Facebook founder Mark
Zuckerberg has been targeted by hackers who were yesterday able to briefly gain
control of several of his social media accounts, some of which were defaced.
His Facebook account was not
among the compromised profiles, although his Pinterest, Twitter and LinkedIn
were, according to Engadget, which was able to screenshot some of the hackers’
messages before they were removed.
A post on Zuckerberg’s
Pinterest page credited the hack to a group called OurMine Team. An associated
Twitter account the hackers were pointing to has since been suspended.
It appears the hackers also
tried to target Zuckerberg’s Instagram account — the only social service in the
hack that is owned by Zuckerberg — but TechCrunch understands Instagram’s
security systems prevented that account from being accessed.
Last month a massive dump of
hacked LinkedIn email and password data cropped up online, thought to date back
to an earlier 2012 hack. Back then LinkedIn had stored passwords as unsalted
SHA-1 hashes, enabling hundreds of thousands to be quickly cracked — and
leaving a massive insecurity legacy by providing hackers with huge amounts of
real-world password data to improve their password-cracking abilities.
It’s unclear if the Zuckerberg hack
incident relates to the vast cache of compromised LinkedIn email and password
data, but it’s possible it does given the timing of the hack — and the fact the
hackers referred to the LinkedIn breach in a message tweeted from Zuckerberg’s
account, which read: “Hey @finkd [Zuckerberg’s Twitter account name], you were
in Linkedin Database”.
The hackers also posted what
they claimed was the password associated with Zuckerberg’s LinkedIn account.
It is possible Zuckerberg was
using the same email and password for multiple social accounts, thereby
enabling several of his social accounts to be compromised in succession.
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