Hoisted On His Own Petard: Group Hacks Julian Assange's WikiLeaks

WikiLeaks got a taste of its own medicine Thursday when a group of hackers known as OurMine briefly took over the notorious site run by Julian Assange.

OurMine, based in Saudi Arabia, hacked DNS servers used by WikiLeaks so that anybody clicking on the site was redirected to a page created by OurMine, which said it was responding to a dare from the other organization to hack them.

WikiLeaks is a global organization that publishes secret information, news leaks and classified media provided by anonymous sources. It published embarrassing emails last year about Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, which may have played some role in her loss to President Donald Trump.

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Gotcha!

In the message it posted to the organization’s web address, OurMine says:

As of early Thursday morning, the WikiLeaks.org homepage displayed a message that read: “Hi, it’s OurMine (Security Group), don’t worry we are just testing your…. blablablab, oh wait, this is not a security test! Wikileaks, remember when you challenged us to hack you?”

“Anonymous, remember when you tried to dox us with fake information for attacking wikileaks?” the message continues. “There we go! One group beat you all! #WikileaksHack lets [sic] get it trending on” Twitter.

Anonymous is another hacker group that had previously posted purported personal information about OurMine, a term known as “doxing” in the rivalry-ridden world of hackers.

The WikiLeaks site was back to what it considers normal later Thursday.

Last year, OurMine hacked Twitter Inc TWTR CEO Jack Dorsey’s Twitter account. The group has also hacked the websites of Variety and BuzzFeed after the news site published an article that claimed to expose one of its members.

The group hacked HBO TWX)’s social media accounts earlier this month.

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Image Credit: By Tania Burgos-Lucero [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons