This weekend, Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of the world’s largest social site (Facebook), showed us just how important a strong password is after having his Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked by a group known as OurMine.
Celebrities, CEOs and world leaders are all major targets for hackers, but Zuckerberg basically invited the attack by allegedly using a six character password which featured all of two unique characters — ‘dadada.’
The hack leads all the way back to a 2012 LinkedIn breach that saw more than six million passwords stolen; Zuckerberg’s seems to have been one of them. Recently, those passwords from the 2012 breach resurfaced on a Dark Net marketplace where they were sold for 5 bitcoin ($2,200).
Ouch. Mark Zuckerberg's social media accounts have been hacked pic.twitter.com/KvVmXOIg5s
— Ben Hall (@Ben_Hall) June 5, 2016
In major breaches such as this, the recommended protocol is to change not only the password on the site that’s been breached, but any other site that uses the same password. Ideally, you’d use a password manager and a unique password on each site you visit, but hey, we get it, the Warrior’s are playing and ain’t nobody got time for that.
What’s not exactly confidence inspiring is the fact Zuckerberg is responsible for securing over 1.5 billion Facebook accounts and can’t be bothered to use a password stronger than most of our first words as an infant. In defense of Zuck, he doesn’t seem to be all that active on either site, so I guess we’ll give him a pass for his password misstep.
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But still, he could take a note from this guy.
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