Facebook’s co-founder and CEO lost control of his LinkedIn, Pinterest and Twitter after cybercriminals hacked into his social media accounts.
The hijackers, dubbed OurMine Team, bragged about hacking Mark Zuckerberg accounts and even posted a tweet using his credentials, urging Zuckerberg to contact them.
The tweet read: “Hey we got access to your Twitter & Instagram & Pinterest, we are just testing your security, please direct message us.”
The cybercriminals claimed that they had also managed to hack into Zuckerberg’s Instagram and Facebook accounts, however the social media platform denied this was the case to VentureBeat.
However, this social media hack was not part of a mastermind plan, the hackers revealed that they found Zuckerberg’s password from the database of 117m stolen passwords from when LinkedIn was compromised in 2012.
The 2012 LinkedIn passwords have recently appeared on the dark web and full details of the hack have come to light.
Despite this LinkedIn database, Zuckerberg made a big, yet common, mistake; he re-used a weak password for multiple sites. His password, “dadada”, which only featured alphabetical characters with no variety, is easily hackable by criminals.
Zuckerberg was not alone, reports have also claimed that OurMine Team had compromised other celebrity Twitter handles, including Katy Perry, Kylie Jenner and Tenancious D.
Four years later, the LinkedIn hack is still causing issues, and it also goes to show tech entrepreneurs can make the same easy mistakes as us.