It feels as if we have to go through the same list of recommendations
once per week, but high-profile celebrities (and CEOs) still seem to be
having some issues with account security on various social networking
sites. So, here we go again. Whether you’re a Twitter newbie or a
Facebook vice president, please don’t use the same passwords across all
of your online sites. If you do, at least make it a very long password
that your average hacker couldn’t just acquire in a brute-force attack.
Even better, if a social network has two-factor authentication, use it.
The latest victim is none other than Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey himself. As Engadget reports, the Twitter overlord had his own
Twitter account broken into at some point early Saturday morning. An
attacker (or group) going by the name of “OurMine” posted a tweet that
they were “testing your security,” followed by a Vine video clip that
has since been deleted.
In fact, all of the not-Dorsey messages posted to
Dorsey’s account came from Vine, so it’s possible that Vine itself was
the attack vector that someone used to gain access to Dorsey’s primary
Twitter stream. It took about a half an hour or so for the posted Tweets
to be deleted from Dorsey’s account—we can only imagine the email that
went flying around Twitter headquarters about the issue.
As for how the attackers actually broken into the
account, or at least Dorsey’s Vine, is still to be known. It’s plausible that
Dorsey’s Vine credentials were listed as part of one of the recent social network breaches, but that would mean that Dorsey hasn’t changed his Vine password for some time.
