Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts hacked

7 Jun 2016

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook CEO, via Wikimedia Commons

Last week, an old password belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, was leaked online. Within days, it was discovered he still used it, so he got hacked.

In a perfect example of what not to do, Mark Zuckerberg appears to be reusing some truly terrible passwords for his social media accounts.

Now, no password is impenetrable, however, the less characters, the easier a password is to crack. So Zuckerberg has learned, after his Twitter and Pinterest accounts were hacked.

Last month, news emerged of a LinkedIn hack dating from 2012, when it was thought more than 6m passwords were stolen. It subsequently emerged that more than 160m accounts were actually compromised.

Among the information obtained during the hack, according to a tweet sent from Zuckerberg’s Twitter account while it was hacked, was Zuckerberg’s  password.

Don’t do what Donny Don’t does

It’s wonderfully ironic, in that Facebook is one of the many tech companies that advises users not to reuse passwords.

LinkedIn had claimed that it had gone through every account on its books that predated 2012 and, if any of the users had failed to change their passwords since then, their passwords had now been invalidated

However, this hack would imply that Zuckerberg was using the same password for Twitter and Pinterest as he used for LinkedIn before the hack – and he must not have updated them since.

Engadget managed to grab some screen shots of the interactions between the hackers and Zuckerberg, which were taken down very quickly – his Facebook and Instagram were not hit.

The LinkedIn dump of logins that emerged last month revealed that Zuckerberg’s password wouldn’t even nearly get into the top 10 terrible options.

The top 10 passwords revealed in the hack were:

  •      123456  (753,305 instances among the breach)
  •      Linkedin (172,523)
  •      Password (144,458)
  •     123456789 (94,314)
  •     12345678 (63,769)
  •     111111 (57,210)
  •     1234567 (49,652)
  •     Sunshine (39,118)
  •     Qwerty (37,538)
  •     654321 (33,854)

Gordon Hunt was a journalist with Silicon Republic

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