WikiLeaks Website Hijacked by OurMine Hacker Group
WikiLeaks is a well-known whistleblowing organization. The information they've leaked to the public has shocked the world many times over. They're a very far-reaching organization whose discoveries have even managed to influence the 2016 American Presidential Elections. Among their biggest recent leaks was the infamous Vault 7 – a set of hacking tools owned by the CIA which gave them the ability to infiltrate a number of systems which were previously considered secure and trustworthy. WikiLeaks' chief is Julian Assange – a famous whistleblower who has been persecuted on the grounds of supposedly sexually assaulting two women in Sweden in 2010.
There has been a widespread public outcry in suspicion that this was just a political move in order to get Assange deported to the US there he could even face a death penalty because of the classified information he's leaked. In 2012 he was granted an asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London and has been living there ever since. This hasn't stopped him from continuing his work regarding WikiLeaks.
WikiLeaks vs. OurMine Hackers
In late August 2017, WikiLeaks' website landing page was taken over by a hacking group that goes by the name OurMine. It's believed that they originate from Saudi Arabia. There has been somewhat of a rivalry between the two organizations for a while, and WikiLeaks had challenged OurMine to hack their website if they're capable. Apparently, OurMine took the challenge and delivered. On the 31st of August, 2017 it appeared that OurMine had infiltrated WikiLeaks' website and changed its main page to a black background with a message on it. The text started as a joke, saying that the hackers are just testing them, but it quickly changed the tone and revealed its true purpose. The message asks if WikiLeaks remember its challenge for OurMine and continues saying that "One group beat you all!".
Despite all the show-off, after an investigation into the issue, it turned out that OurMine didn't actually take control of the WikiLeaks website. None of the servers or files that belong to WikiLeaks were breached. What OurMine had done, instead, is a much simpler task to complete. They redirected the traffic from the WikiLeaks page to a page they've constructed. The traffic redirection process is accomplished by attacking the DNS servers of a page and directing all the incoming traffic to another page. This attack is usually called either DNS spoofing or DNS poisoning.
Julian Assange took to twitter and announced that there hasn't really been a breach, but instead, two DNS attacks had taken place. It didn't take long for the attack to be noticed and taken care of. WikiLeaks' site is up and running without a trace of OurMine's actions.
This whole fiasco makes us think that OurMine is all talk and no action.