Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts were recently hacked.
And no, he didn’t do it on purpose.
According to Mashable, Zuckerberg has not used his Twitter account in four years. Since he’s been so silent on that front, followers were naturally curious when the title of Zuckerberg’s Twitter was changed and tweets started appearing.
As it turns out, a hacker collective called OurMine gained access to Zuckerberg’s accounts, changing his Twitter title to “Hacked By OurMine Team.” This was just one step in their “proof,” accompanied by their claim that they were only testing Zuckerberg’s security.
Unusual activity from #MarkZuckerberg #Twitter account! #hacked pic.twitter.com/3MXTuCHJqG
— Susmit Laha (@SusmitLaha) June 5, 2016
While nothing appears to have been changed on his Instagram account, that particular breach has Zuckerberg’s team a bit more on edge because it is Facebook-owned.
OurMine is responsible for compiling user credentials from the DayZ gaming community back in February as well as the DDoS (distributed denial of service) attacks against numerous financial institutions in 2015. The latter attack resulted in thousands of dollars being siphoned from “customers in the financial services sector” with the hacker group announcing “it will give that money to the poor.”
According to a since-deleted tweet, OurMine claims to have gotten Zuckerberg’s password from the LinkedIn dump, which revealed many usernames and passwords from 2012 to present.
If this is true, Zuckerberg is not only guilty of recycling the same password for multiple websites, but making it easy to remember.
Each social media account should have its own unique password, which should be specific to the user and not easy for third parties to guess.
Other high-profile accounts have also been hacked, including Bon Iver, Katy Perry, Keith Richards, and Tame Impala. Perry’s hacker went so far as to tweet rapid-fire insults at her “immense follower base.”
According to the Drama Alert blog, researchers have “estimated” that OurMine is made up of 3-5 people from Saudi Arabia, making it “very hard to find them.” Unfortunately, the subreddit has been switched to private.
Facebook has denied further comment.
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