If you’ve heard this once, you need to hear it again—and again: Never use the same password and username for more than one account!
If this got Mark Zuckerberg’s (Facebook’s chief executive). Twitter account hacked, it can get just about anybody hacked.
A report at nytimes.com says that the OurMine hacking group takes credit for busting into Zuckerberg’s accounts including LinkedIn and Pinterest. It’s possible that this breach was cultivated by a repeated password of Zuckerberg’s.
According to OurMine, Zuckerberg had been using the same password for several accounts. Not only is that asking for trouble, but the password itself is highly crackable: dadada. Don’t laugh. A hacker’s software will find this in minutes.
How to Protect Your Accounts
Visit Have I Been Pwned to see if your e-mail account has been hacked. I did. 6 of my accounts showed up as being part of data dumps of sites that were hacked. Then I checked all 6 accounts, all had different passwords, but I still changed them. One was gmail, but with two factor verification/authentication, I’ve had no issue. Simply type your e-mail address into the field and click “Pwned?” If the result shows bad news, then you must immediately change your password to one that you’ve never had before—and at least eight characters and unique.
Robert Siciliano CEO of IDTheftSecurity.com, personal security and identity theft expert and speaker is the author of 99 Things You Wish You Knew Before Your Identity Was Stolen. See him knock’em dead in this identity theft preventionvideo.