Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter and Pinterest accounts breached by Saudi Arabia-based hackers

Hackers claim to have hacked into Mark Zuckerberg's lesser-known social media accounts. The Facebook founder's Twitter and Pinterest accounts were reportedly targeted by Saudi Arabia-based hackers. A group called OurMine has claimed responsibility for the breach and is believed to have found Zuckerberg's password in the recent LinkedIn data dump.

Twitter was quick to respond by deleting the hacker group's tweets and suspending their accounts. Pinterest also cleaned up the defacement to Zuckerberg's account, but not before social media was overrun with images of the hacked accounts. In a deleted tweet, the hackers also claim to have accessed Zuckerberg's Instagram account and said that they were "just testing your [Zukerberg's] security", BBC reported.

A Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat that Zuckerberg's Instagram account was not breached, despite the hackers' claims. "No Facbeook systems or accounts were accessed. The affected accounts have been re-secured," Facebook said.

The hackers also uncovered that Zuckerberg's LinkedIn password was "dadada", which he had also used for his other social media accounts, indicating that the recent LinkedIn data dump may have aided the hackers in their efforts to gain access to the tech giant's accounts. Zuckerberg's Twitter account, which was briefly suspended after the breach, had no new posts since January 2012.

Who is OurMine Team?

According to a report by Softpedia, the hacker group OurMine, consists of a small team of teenage hackers based in Saudi Arabia. Content Delivery Network (CDN) and cloud security provider Akamai profiled the hacker group in 2015, noting that the group had graduated from defacing and hacking social media accounts to DDoSing financial institutions.

Safe password practices

Password reuse is common practise among many. However, in light of the recent string of breaches, users have been cautioned against reusing passwords. The recent LinkedIn data dump saw hackers having leaked over 100 million members' passwords, which were stolen in 2012. The resulting after-effects of the data dump have been far-reaching.