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Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter, Pinterest Hacked

The attackers claim they obtained Zuckerberg's passwords from a 2012 LinkedIn account dump.

June 5, 2016
DON'T USE Facebook Fatigue

Mark Zuckerberg, contrary to what you might think, is but a mere mortal. Yes, he runs Facebook and has a large amount of influence over your online life.

Yes, he's worth a squillion dollars and basically wears the same outfits all the time. But he still has his accounts hacked just like everyone else because of weak password security.

According to reports, the hacking group OurMine Team has taken responsibility for breaking into Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts this weekend. Zuckerberg likely doesn't use either account very much since, you know, he has his own social network. Still, one would think he (or his assistants) would employ stronger security measures to stop anyone with a password from getting in.

OurMine Hack

According to a tweet posted from Zuckerberg's account—which was likely not from him, since he hasn't tweeted since 2012—the attackers claim that Zuckerberg's password was one of more than 100 million obtained by an attacker in a 2012 LinkedIn hack. As Motherboard previously reported, these user names and encrypted passwords were allegedly easy for hackers to figure out.

LinkedIn confirmed in a blog post last month that the breach, initially thought to be just a few million accounts and passwords, was actually much larger; about 117 million included emails and encrypted passwords. The company has since been invalidating these passwords and notifying affected users. Perhaps Zuck didn't check his email recently.

The not-from Zuckerberg tweet on his timeline suggests that the Facebook CEO's password was simply "dadada," and it told anyone reading to simply direct message the account to obtain additional proof of the hack. Ocelot Uproar's Ben Hall also reports that a message posted to Pinterest indicated that Zuckerberg's account was, again, hacked by the "OurMine Team," likely using either the same leaked password or another one registered to whatever email address Zuckerberg used for the service.

As VentureBeat notes, Twitter was quick to suspend Zuckerberg's account. It has since been restored with the aforementioned tweet deleted. We can only assume the password has been changed and, ideally, more security measures have been enabled for the account. Zuckerberg's Pinterest has also been scrubbed of any messages posted by others.

"Hey @finkd we got access to your Twitter & Instagram & Pinterest,we are just testing your security, please dm us," read a tweet on OurMine's Twitter feed this morning. The account has since been suspended.

Random Access: Fujifilm X70, Mark Zuckerberg hacked, Steam Machines flopping, shake-up at NEST

Posted by PCMag on Monday, June 6, 2016

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About David Murphy

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David Murphy got his first real taste of technology journalism when he arrived at PC Magazine as an intern in 2005. A three-month gig turned to six months, six months turned to occasional freelance assignments, and he later rejoined his tech-loving, mostly New York-based friends as one of PCMag.com's news contributors. For more tech tidbits from David Murphy, follow him on Facebook or Twitter (@thedavidmurphy).

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