Mark Zuckerberg, the tech billionaire, computer programmer, and Internet entrepreneur was hacked Sunday. The hacker syndicate dubbed ‘OurMine Team’ was reportedly able to infiltrate Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts due to apparently weak security measures.
There is no hard evidence on how OurMine Team was able to pull off the breaches, but the hacker group is implying it was due to two key factors.
Just a few weeks ago a renewed problem occurred at LinkedIn, a rival social networking company, where approximately 117 million users’ emails and passwords were revealed. Three years ago, around 6.5 million mismanaged LinkedIn passwords were exposed in a similar leak. LinkedIn notified all of the users affected by the security breach and they were subsequently instructed to change their passwords.
Zuckerberg seems to have an affinity for his unearthed password. Tweets were sent out through Zuckerberg’s account implying that his password used for LinkedIn was the same one for his Twitter and Pinterest accounts.
While the tweets have since been deleted, one read: “Hey, [Mark Zuckerberg]. You were in Linkedin Database with the password “dadada”! DM for proof.”
According to Facebook’s official ‘Help Center’, there are a number of guidelines that need to be satisfied to make a password strong and secure. “ … Make sure that it’s at least 6 characters long. Try to use a complex combination of numbers, letters and punctuation marks,” reads the support page. Other suggestions include “mixing together uppercase and lowercase letter or making the password longer” and using a password that is “different than the passwords you use to log into other accounts”.
If it’s true Zuckerberg’s consistent choice for his online password is “dadada”, then he didn’t satisfy any of his own company’s suggestions.
Zuckerberg may have been worried that he would forget his passwords for all of his online accounts, whether from banks or social media, which is sure to be numerous given the assumed nature of his assets and stature. In today’s age of online commerce and communication, it is an understandable problem. There are a myriad of free password manager applications out there that help people sort and catalog users’ many usernames and passwords.
Regardless, there is one consistent, simple rule of thumb for online security.
“The password you create should be easy for you to remember but hard for someone else to figure out,” reads Facebook’s ‘Login & Password’ support page.
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