FC Barcelona’s fans were in for a surprise yesterday when the club’s official Facebook and Twitter pages announced the signing of Angel Di Maria from Paris Saint-Germain Football Club.
That there had been no word of this move baffled the fans — turns out that the account had been hacked.
“It had been a trying 24 hours for the Barcelona, as on Tuesday the club announced they were suing Neymar after alleging the Brazilian failed to fulfil his agreement with the team,” said a report in The Goal on Wednesday.
The hacker group “OurMine”, which had hacked the social media accounts of Sony’s Playstation on Monday, has taken responsibility for the move. Believed to be a Saudi Arabian hacking group, “OurMine” tweeted: “Hi FC Barcelona, it’s ‘OurMine’ (Security Group), please contact us...and sorry for the hoax.”
For an hour, the club kept deleting the tweets while “OurMine” kept re-posting them.
The group also attempted to get the hashtag #FCBHack trending on the Twitter.
The hacker group is known for breaching into high-profile figures and companies’ social media accounts, including, those of HBO.
Though “OurMine” claims to be a security group, its official website describes the group as “an elite hacker group known for many hacks showing vulnerabilities in major systems.”
“OurMine” was also responsible for hacking the social media accounts of Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google’s Sundar Pichai and Twitter’s Dick Costolo in 2016. They have also not spared websites like Variety, TechCrunch and BuzzFeed.
