It’s Royal Rumble weekend, and WWE is riding a huge high right now. They had yet another very well-received NXT TakeOver event on Saturday night, and interest in Sunday’s Royal Rumble pay-per-view is definitely high, especially as no one seems to have any idea who is going to win the top matches on the card. There has, however, been one small blemish on the weekend.
Within an hour after NXT TakeOver: San Antonio, some strange tweets popped up on a couple of WWE owned and operated Twitter accounts, including the official NXT account and the WWE Universe account, which is the “official fan account” that operates as a parallel Twitter feed to the main WWE account most of the time, with the two accounts often cross-retweeting each other during live coverage of events and so forth.
These were the tweets that appeared on the WWE Universe and NXT accounts, and both remained up as the top tweet on both accounts for the better part of an hour, until they were finally deleted without comment and business returned to normal on the accounts.
The entity that took credit for the tweets, OurMine, is a hacker group that according to Wikipedia, “uses hacks of celebrity internet accounts to advertise their commercial services.” In the past, they’ve hacked the accounts of co-founders of Wikipedia and Twitter, the creator of Pokemon GO, and Mark Zuckerberg. So… you know, WWE is in good company.
Mashable managed to get a quote from an OurMine representative, which did indeed take credit for the simultaneous hacks, including the WrestleMania and SummerSlam accounts … and the official John Cena account.
“We just hacked it using the head of WWE social media account,” a representative said. “It is linked to all of WWE Superstars accounts — Twitter and Facebook.”
…
The group insists it is only testing security. However, on its website, it offers commercial services including testing social media and email accounts for vulnerabilities.
All things considered, WWE got off extremely lucky. Someone gained access to their very high-profile and well-followed accounts, and all they did was post a cheeky logo and link. Just imagine how much worse it could be. AMAZINGLY WORSE. We’re not that far removed from that one airline tweeting the picture of the lady putting the you-know-what in her you-know-where.
It’s a light bit of embarrassment for the company, but they should breathe a massive sigh of relief that the hack wasn’t more malicious.
Important lesson: protect those passwords, people. Enable that two-factor authorization. No one wants to get hacked. With that said, I now leave it to you to imagine what password WAS being used for these accounts until OurMine cracked the code.
