WikiLeaks down for two hours after clash between two hacking groups
08 Jul 2016
WikiLeaks went down for two hours due to a war between two rival hacking groups, according to online reports. The groups had been identified as Anonymous, or at least the YourAnonNews part of it, and OurMine.
Anonymous had grown with WikiLeaks as a protest group, while OurMine claims to be a serious security service that specialises in exposing high-profile targets and their weaknesses.
OurMine had successfully hacked accounts of Google's Sundar Pichai and Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
According to online reports, the two groups had had a rivalry going since 2015, and the attack was fallout of an earlier dispute over WikiLeaks and a DDoS attack.
The rivalry, much of which had played out on Twitter, was still ongoing. According to news site The Next Web, OurMine took out WikiLeaks in revenge.
BuzzFeed posted screenshots of a direct message exchange between OurMine and WikiLeaks in which the target site offered the hacker group some advice on more effective account breaking.
According to a WikiLeaks' Twitter admin, OurMine's attacks on Zuckerberg and Pichai should have gone further and the attacks were a "a huge waste". Instead, WikiLeaks stats they should have impersonated the CEOs to gather more information, eg, ''sending DMs as Zuckerberg to further access elsewhere. Same with the Google CEO."
OurMine agreed in a tweet that this was a great idea.
OurMine poses as a friendly service to give companies confidence in the security of their own systems.
"We scan the whole company websites and staffs and give you the weaknesses and how to fix it. We scan your website to find vulnerability and how to fix it," the group claims. It adds that a money back guarantee was available.
