Facebook founder and CEO, Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter,
Instagram and Pinterest accounts were briefly hacked on Sunday (June 05) by a
group calling itself ‘OurMine Team’, apparently using information from a major
LinkedIn security breech that occurred in 2012.
This implies the social media guru reused passwords across
multiple sites or perhaps that the format of the password he chose for other
sites was guessable after breaking his LinkedIn login credentials.
A tech magazine, Engadget captured a tweet from OurMine
revealing the password as ‘dadada’. Zuckerberg recently became a dad.
The group, whose principal Twitter account has since been
suspended, then messaged him to say that it had found his password on a
LinkedIn database of user details that was leaked online last month.
Both Twitter and Pinterest rapidly restored control of the
accounts over the weekend, and the rogue posts have now been removed—though not
before they were screencapped:
“Ouch. Mark Zuckerberg's social media accounts have been
hacked pic.twitter.com/KvVmXOIg5s
— Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) June 5, 2016”
Hopefully this time stronger passwords have been put up in
the accounts.
The billionaire’s Facebook account was not affected.
"No Facebook systems or accounts were accessed. The
affected accounts have been re-secured," said Facebook Inc. statement
which was released on Monday (June 06).
The group said that it was just trying to alert Zuckerberg
of the security flaw.
LinkedIn's 2012 breach was significant and embarrassing for
the company, and resulted in the theft of millions of passwords and other user
information. Users were warned at the time to change their LinkedIn passwords,
and those on any other platform on which they were reused. This is clearly
evergreen advice, as it isn't hard for a determined hacker to cross-reference
someone's username and password information with other sites.
There's no evidence of any widespread damage stemming from
the hacked accounts probably Zuckerberg hasn’t tweeted since 2012.
On Pinterest account, the name was changed to read: “Hacked
By OurMine Team.”
Zuckerberg has accounts with several rival social media
companies, such as Twitter and LinkedIn, but none of them are very active.