Royal Rumble weekend is upon us and the WWE is having a huge moment right now. They had a great NXT TakeOver event Saturday night, and interest in Sunday’s Rumble pay-per-view is sky high. That is probably due to the fact that no one has any idea who is going to win any of the high profile matches on the card. As with most big events, there is one small blunder that prevents the entire thing from going off without a hitch.
Less than an hour after NXT TakeOver: San Antonio, a few strange tweets popped up on a couple of WWE owned and operated Twitter accounts, including the official NXT account and the WWE Universe account. WWE Universe operates as the “official fan account” that basically serves as additional content to the main WWE account and gives viewers a more rounded viewing experience using content from both sources. Mashable managed to get some screenshots of the tweets before they were pulled down:
The tweets that appeared on those accounts remained on Twitter as the top tweets for both accounts for the better part of an hour, until they were deleted without comment by the company and everything went on like nothing happened.
OurMine, the entity that took credit for this stunt, is a hacker group that has hacked the accounts of the co-founders of Wikipedia, Twitter, the creator of Pokemon Go, and Mark Zuckerberg in the past. The WWE shouldn’t feel so bad about being their latest target. Wikipedia says that the group, “uses hacks of celebrity internet accounts to advertise their commercial services.”
Mashable approached an OurMine representative for comment, the group did take credit for the simultaneous hacks, which included the WrestleMania, SummerSlam accounts, and John Cena official account. “We just hacked it using the head of the WWE social media account,” the representative said. “It is linked to all of WWE Superstars accounts—Twitter and Facebook.”
WWE got off pretty lucky considering how badly this all could have gone. A logo and link is about the best sort of thing the hackers could have tweeted. In the event of more explicit content, the company would have had to pull a Kurt Rambis for sure. Hopefully, this has taught them a valuable lesson about security and they at least changed their passwords.
