Real Madrid Social Media Accounts Hacked!

Last Friday evening, a tweet from the Football Club - Real Madrid’s official account announcing the signing of Lionel Messi, took football fans by surprise. The tweet read:

"Benvingut Messi!
¡Bienvenido Messi!
Welcome Messi!
Bienvenue Messi!
#Messi"

The post included a video of Messi scoring the winning goal in Barcelona's dramatic 3-2 stoppage-time victory at Madrid’s home ground - Santiago Bernabeu, last season.

Later, It was found out that the hacker group, OurMine, had hacked into Real Madrid’s Facebook and Twitter accounts, posting the Tweets. Just a few days back they had hacked FC Barcelona’s Twitter and Facebook Accounts announcing the signing of Angel Di Maria.

The series of Tweets were as follows:

"OurMine Team here, Internet security is sh** and we proved that. Ourmine.org for more security *Not Only FC Barcelona *"

“Let’s make #RealMadridHack Trending”

“We sold Benzema, do you want us to buy any player?  *i know that;s black hat but i’m bored waiting for real madrid”

The club managed to regain control of their accounts in some time and deleted the tweets.

Ankush Johar, director at HumanFirewall.io, a leading provider of human information security awareness and preparedness solutions, said: “These type of attacks mostly happen by either finding a way into the internal networks of the organisation and stealing passwords from unprotected sources or the most common way is by stealing passwords using social engineering tactics - phishing attacks.

"Humans are the weakest link in cybersecurity and hackers are well aware of that. Famous social media accounts usually have weak passwords which makes it a child’s play for hackers to brute force and get the actual password as seen in the case of numerous celebrity iCloud hacks.

"Always use multi-factor authentication to protect social media accounts, especially if you're famous!"