John Hanke, CEO of Pokémon Go creator Niantic, is the latest in a string of high-profile Twitter account hacks recently.
The hack saw Hanke join the likes of Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg and Jack Dorsey — the CEOs of Google, Facebook and Twitter — and again, the hack was perpetrated by OurMine, the Saudi collective that claimed responsibility for the previous social media hacks as well as taking down WikiLeaks a month back.
OurMine gained access to the account due to a failure on behalf of Hanke to secure it with a difficult password. The hackers claim the password was “nopass,” a six letter attempt without numbers or special characters that would take hackers under a minute to brute force.
Hanke would have been better served using a password manager to manage his accounts. Tools like 1Password, Last Pass (although it had a recent vulnerability), DashLane and others allow you to create strong (un-guessable) passwords without actually having to remember them. Instead, you’ll just remember a single master password to access all your accounts.
It’s baffling how this keeps happening to high-profile CEOs and celebrities when we’ve been warned for years about the danger posed by utilizing weak passwords. But, live and learn I guess. I doubt Hanke makes this mistake again.
Get the TNW newsletter
Get the most important tech news in your inbox each week.