Twitter account of WikiPedia Founder Jimmy Wales Hacked by OurMine

August 21, 2016

1 minute read

OurMine hackers have found their new target and this time it’s WikiPedia co-founder Jimmy Wales

The official Twitter account of Jimmy Wales, co-founder of the online encyclopedia, Wikipedia and Wikia web-hosting company was hacked by OurMine Hackers yesterday.

After taking over Wales account the hackers defaced the Bio section and sent two tweets claiming that “WikiPedia is a lie” and “RIP Jimmy Wales 1966 — 2016 #RIPJimmyWales” which left his followers in confusion. We at HackRead can confirm that Wales in alive and hackers were trying to gain attention by creating a hoax.

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Once again, after hacking the Twitter account OurMine tried to promote its “online security services”. Remember, OurMine is the same group who has been hacking social media accounts of high-profile tech celebrities by using old passwords from LinkedIn and MySpace data dumps.

In the past couple of months, OurMine took over accounts of Pokémon Go’s creator John Hanke, Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai, Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg, co-founder of video-sharing website Vimeo Zach Klein and Twitter account of Facebook VP Adam Mosseri.

At the time of publishing this article; Wales account was restored however celebrity Twitter hacking saga will continue unless they implement proper security measures.

Author

Carolina

Carolina works for HackRead as a technical writer. She is a Brazilian traveller who has been to almost every country around the world. She has a keen interest in technology, gadgets and social media.