Social media accounts belonging to the National Football League along with 15 teams have been hijacked by notorious hacking group OurMine.

The hacks primarily affect Twitter accounts but in some cases include Instagram and Facebook accounts. Hacked Twitter accounts showed messages that read “We’re back (OurMine). We are here to show people that everything is hackable,” followed by contact details for the group and bizarrely a message appealing for the hashtag #OurMineBack to trend on Twitter.

The Chiefs’ Twitter account was hacked. The #49ers’ Twitter account was not hacked.

Defense wins championships. pic.twitter.com/KEcD3BZhtm

— Rob Lowder (@Rob_Lowder) January 27, 2020

How the hack took place is not currently known, but as ZDNet reported, a large portion of the tweets posted by OurMine came from Khoros, a web service used by digital marketing and public relations departments to manage social media accounts. The suggestion is that Khoros itself may have been hacked, giving OurMine access to the account, but officially the company is denying it was compromised.

In response to the hacks, Twitter said that it had locked compromised accounts as soon as being made aware of the issue and that it’s investigating the situation. Facebook responded similarly, saying that they investigating as well as working to secure and restore access to affected accounts.

OurMine, which is believed to be a Saudi Arabian hacking group that also promotes its own cybersecurity service, is behind a range of previous high-profile hacks. It has been fairly quiet since 2017, but its better-known exploits include hacking the accounts of Facebook Inc. founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg and Google Inc. CEO Sundar Pichai, as well as others. It was last in the news in April 2017, when it hacked a number of well-known YouTube users.

“High-profile social media accounts are attractive targets for hacker groups,” Ashlee Benge, threat researcher at cybersecurity firm ZeroFOX Inc., told SiliconANGLE. “By compromising these accounts, especially in large numbers, they are able to use them to spread a message to a large audience of followers without needing to cultivate such a following themselves.”

Often the compromised accounts used for a sort of tagging, in which the hacker group uses the accounts to make its name known, Benge added. “Such is the case here, where these compromised NFL accounts are used to generate buzz around the group’s name,” he said.

Photo: Pxhere