Facebook’s Twitter account compromised, hacker group claims credit

There’s this brilliant feeling on Fridays if you’re a reporter when you think that all the things you have to write about are complete. You kickstart some work for Monday. Maybe you tighten up a to-do list. Hell, you might even read some email.

But then on Fridays like today, something eye-catching happens and the Great Content Gods demand written sacrifice and here we are.

Facebook’s Twitter main page and Messenger were temporarily vandalized by a person or persons claiming to be from the OurMine hacker collective. The action, and the group, should sound slightly familiar as it hacked a bunch of sports-related Twitter accounts just this January.

Trawling the TechCrunch archives turns up the OurMine name more times than I reckoned it would. For example, OurMine also hacked the Twitter account of Niantic’s CEO back in 2016. Later that year, OurMind also hacked several media-related Twitter accounts. Hell, OurMine actually hacked TC once — a fact that this episode brought to my attention.

TechCrunch has reached out to Facebook for comment on the compromise. We’re not expecting to hear back anything of substance but, if we do, we’ll update this post. Twitter provided public comment regarding the hack, saying that it “locked the compromised accounts and are working closely with our partners at Facebook to restore them” when it noticed the matter.

What was posted? The following, per a screenshot taken by TechCrunch’s security sage Zack Whittaker:

As you can see from the screenshot, the tweet appears to have been posted via Khoros. Khoros, in case you also didn’t know, sells software to help companies use social media to interact with customers and users. So, perhaps the Folks With Time On Their Hands got in that way. Either way it was taken down quickly. (Khoros is based in Austin and has raised no known venture capital, per Crunchbase.)

And with that, Friday really is a go.