Vevo Hacked: Video Service Breached by OurMine; Documents and Data Published Online
Vevo, a video hosting service that promotes music videos from the biggest names in music today, fell victim to hackers. The media group was the latest in a list of breaches committed by hacking group OurMine, and they had their data and sensitive documents stolen and posted online to the public.
The service is formed by a joint venture between music industry giants including Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music, Abu Dhabi Media and Google umbrella firm Alphabet Inc, making it one of the high profile targets that was compromised by hackers recently.
Vevo confirmed that they have been attacked by a hacker that used the business networking platform LinkedIn to fish out security credentials. "We can confirm that Vevo experienced a data breach as a result of a phishing scam via Linkedin," a company representative said to Mashable earlier today.
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"We have addressed the issue and are investigating the extent of exposure," the spokesperson added. Vevo also confirmed that their subsidiary in the United Kingdom has not been affected by the breach.
Hacking group OurMine published several hundreds of GB worth of the company's data, out of the estimated 3.12 TB of documents, videos and other internal files that the group has stolen. It's a mix of sensitive financial and company files and other media content, as well as details about the artists they are promoting, as examined by Gizmodo.
As for their motivation, the group reportedly decided to go ahead and publish the documents because an employee from the company was being extremely rude. According to a chat log posted by OurMine, the employee told them off after they informed the person that they are not sharing the private files.
OurMine have since taken down the shared files, presumably after negotiations with Vevo.
Vevo is now another notch in the group's growing tally of major companies they have broken into, after their recent takeover of HBO's social media accounts, as well as their more recent trashing of Wikileaks' website.
