It seems it is easy to get Mark Zuckerberg's goat. The Facebook founder was targeted once again by OurMine, a notorious hacking group. This time the hacking group hacked into the billionaire's Pinterest account.
In a report published by WccfTech, Zuckerberg's Pinterest account was targeted a second time as claimed by OurMine who was also responsible for hacking into Zuckerberg's account the first time in June this year.
The hackers have not made known the modus operandi other than to say that a "exploit on Pinterest" vulnerability was used. However, OurMine had said, about the previous hack, that they had used information found through a LinkedIn password dump.
OurMine, the Saudi-based hacker, emailed ZDNet's security editor Zack Whittaker about the hack as reported in the Daily Mail. More ominously, the hacker shared Zuckerberg's public Twitter username and password. It appears that the Facebook founder had strengthened his security features after the first hack by enabling a two-factor authentication process.
The report also reveals some startling information about the password used by Zuckerberg. The current Twitter password was the one used by him on his Gmail account prior to June.
OurMine is a hacking group that resorts to hacking accounts of celebrities to promote itself and to build awareness about security practices. Besides Zuckerberg, OurMine has claimed similar attacks on Google's Sundar Pichai, and Travis Kalanick, Uber's founder.
These breaches sound ominous for the security of usernames and passwords. The Dailymail report also mentions the fact that more than 160 million accounts were compromised in the LinkedIn password dump.
After the password dump was leaked, the dark web has become a haven for cyber criminals where they can bid for leaked information. The currency used by these bidders is bitcoins. Each bitcoin is about $440.
One silver lining in all these reports is the veracity of the hacking modus operandi. It has been difficult to verify the claims made by hackers. It is possible that most hacking is done with the help of leaked information and not on account of some great hacking technique that breaches the security walls created by technologists.
