Hackers Briefly Take Control Of Some HBO Twitter Accounts

It’s been a rough few weeks for HBO: Not one, but two unreleased episodes of its hit show Game of Thrones have been leaked online ahead of schedule, and hackers are claiming to hold massive amounts of the company’s data for ransom. And on Wednesday night, a group of hackers temporarily took over various HBO Twitter accounts.

Along with the main @HBO account, pages for several of the company’s series — including Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, True Blood, Veep, and Vinyl — sent out messages purporting to be from known hackers, reports NBC News.

It appears that only accounts based in the U.S. were affected.

HBO regained control within the hour and removed the Tweets, but here’s one NBC saved:

“The infringement on our social media accounts was recognized and rectified quickly,” an HBO spokesperson told Consumerist.

While it’s unconfirmed that OurMine was definitely responsible for this incident, the messages mirror those posted by the group in past hacking episodes. The group is well known for breaching high-profile social media accounts, including Netflix, Marvel, Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams (Twitter), Sundar Pichai (Google), Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia), BuzzFeed, and Forbes.

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