Mark Zuckerberg’s Social Media Accounts Hacked!

It is quite startling to know that even nine-digit earners in the fast-evolving tech industry get hacked as well. If you still doubt the possibility of anyone stealing into a high-flying billionaire’s social media account, then what just happened to Facebook CEO – Mark Zuckerberg – is a much-needed eye-opener.

While the 32-year-old chief executive will himself swear before a global multitude Facebook fans that a strong password is all you need to ward off hackers, he just seems equally unable to drink whatever he preaches.

After hacking into the tech guru’s social media accounts, the triumphant attackers immediately posted messages showing off their pried catch. Now everyone out there wonders why Mr. Zuckerberg didn’t create varying passwords for his social networking accounts, and instead opted to coin a similar password for all his accounts – ranging from Twitter to Pinterest.

The hackers, who used the name OurMine Team, proved that they had indeed accessed Zuckerberg’s Twitter and Pinterest accounts before they further offered they had also entered his Instagram account, although there is scantily any evidence to support these hard-to-believe allegations.

And do you think it is one of those complex passwords that would necessitate the use of a password manager? Hell no! Mark Zuckerberg’s password is a mere “dadada” – whatever makes this easily memorable to the young billionaire is his personal secret that, it seems, no hacker can ever fathom. But just why on earth couldn’t the widely celebrated technology heavyweight use a harder-to-guess passphrase?

These unsettling developments came after the recent reports of several LinkedIn accounts being compromised by another group of elusive cyber attackers. It seems that this 2012 LinkedIn hacking is whatever led to the innovative billionaire’s woes. “Hey, [Mark Zuckerberg],” one message sent from his Twitter account reads. “You were in [the] LinkedIn Database with the password “dadada” ! DM for proof.” This is what the hackers posted after their notoriously fruitful assault on Zuckerberg’s two accounts.

Zuckerberg is not a keen Twitter user. He shared his latest tweet in 2012, and the notorious tweets sent by the infamous hackers have since been done away with. You don’t like to commit the same blunder as Zuck? Security doyens unanimously recommend that you use different, hard-to-predict passwords for each of your accounts. With this safeguard if one account gets hacked, the rest aren’t as well. If it’s tricky to memorize all the thorny passwords, then consider using a password manager.

By the same token, “dadada” isn’t a thoughtfully selected password, either. It’s rather short, making it quite possible for software to “brute-force” guess – by merely cycling through every probable set of letters until they trip up onto the right one. Facebook cofounder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg reasonably has accounts on other social platforms – it only makes good sense to maintain tabs on what the rivalry is up to.

So what does these unprecedented late Sunday activities teach not only Zuckerberg but also every other sensible internet user out there? First, you should never take cyber security tips for granted. Secondly, never use similar passphrases/passwords for all your accounts. And thirdly – never even for a split-second think that you are way too smart for this hard-to-pin-down breed of humans called hackers. They are always a leg ahead, or at least so it seems…