A group of Saudi Arabia based hackers managed to get hold of the Twitter, Instagram and Pintrest accounts of Mark Zuckerberg. Those accounts have since been “re-secured using best practices”, a Facebook FB.O spokesman told Reuters, adding, “no Facebook systems or accounts were accessed”.
Advertisement
In a statement to Venturebeat, Facebook has confirmed that Mark Zuckerberg’s Instagram account was not hijacked, it was just a fluke attempt on the hacker group’s part to cause chaos and vandalism.
And, I am sure you are curious as to whom would succeed at doing such a thing.
The OurMine group has been associated with February 2016 hacking of user credentials from the DayZ gaming community. Considering Zuckerberg hasn’t tweeted since 2012 (and even then, only sparingly), it’s likely he completely forgot about the account and its ill-conceived password, and the fact that he’d reused it.
Media Mogul Zuckerberg boasts 700,000 followers on Twitter and 13,000 on Pinterest.
The group has returned both the accounts to the owner and has also deleted the offensive tweets and posts done from the hacked accounts.
Numerous accounts in question are relatively inactive – Mr Zuckerberg has not sent a tweet since 2012, while his Instagram account shows only 30 photos. Last month, security researcher Troy Hunt revealed over 164 million LinkedIn email addresses and passwords had been exposed from that breach.
But a screenshot of Zuckerberg’s Pinterest account was posted to Twitter which seemed to show it had been renamed “Hacked by OurMine team”. While, affected users at the professional network might have already reset their passwords, this should also serve as a reminder for them to use new passwords for every other site that relied on the old LinkedIn passwords.
In the past few days, numerous celebrity Twitter Inc. Katy Perry’s account was hacked a week ago, and over the weekend Mark Zuckerberg, Keith Richards, Tenancious D, Kylie Jenner, and the late Ryan Dunn have all had their Twitter accounts taken over.
Advertisement
You should check to see if your email account has been compromised.
