Another high-profile Twitter account has been hacked and this time, the target is the CEO of Niantic, John Hanke, the developer of the world’s most popular location-based augmented reality game Pokemon GO.
Pokemon GO Developer’s Twitter Account Hacked
The Twitter account of the CEO of Niantic, John Hanke (@johnhanke), was invaded due to delay in release. Until the morning of Monday (1), the account still showed messages like “This is for Brazil” signal that access had not yet been recovered.
The hack was made by the hackers group OurMine, yes the same group that also invaded Mark Zuckerberg’s account earlier. The situation is similar because while Zuckerberg password was at that time “dadada” and the Hanke’s password was “nopass” which means “no password”.
With the equal password of six characters, the hacker group OurMine was able to break the password in just 2 minutes and 41 seconds per, the method used which was by the hackers group OurMine was also used to hack Facebook and Foursquare account. However, hackers did not do anything just because they had very little number of followers.
The member of OurMine who participated in the invasion has spoken to Forbes where they said that “We did this for two reasons: to test his security and for Brazil” as they also state that they seek for the security of accounts and teaching people to secure their online accounts better.
This first reason, to test the security which was repeated by the hacker group when they got access to Zuckerberg accounts as well. A few weeks ago, they also claimed an attack by DDoS the servers of Pokemon Go, and this time, they did this to show them how to protect servers.
The hacker also said that the members of OurMine do not play Pokemon Go, but do such actions to show that no one is safe. “We are trying to tell people that no one is safe. Always use authentication by two steps in their accounts and change passwords in every two or three weeks” they said.