Facebook’s Twitter and Instagram accounts were hacked via
a third-party service, and the hackers quickly published a post on both
accounts before the intrusion was discovered.
The message posted by the hackers simply read “Well, even
Facebook is hackable but at least their security better than Twitter.”
Hacking of verified and important Twitter accounts is quite
common. The biggest problem for any online account is that people choose weak
passwords, but that’s not the case with the recent incident.
According to a Cnet report,
Facebook’s Twitter account was hacked by using a third-party service, which had
the right to post to the social network. It’s actually a much bigger problem
than figuring out weak passwords, as many other entities likely use the same third-party
service.
OurMine is the name of the group responsible for the
intrusion, and they’re the same ones who hacked Twitter’s CEO Jack Dorsey’s
account as well. They just posted a couple of entries, one for Facebook and one
for Instagram mocking Twitter’s apparent bad security.
“As soon as we were made aware of the issue, we
locked the compromised accounts and are working closely with our partners at
Facebook to restore them,” said a Twitter spokesperson.
While it’s unclear what Twitter will do to prevent such
events in the future, this latest problem highlights the importance of
two-factor authentication. In a hack just last month, a few Twitter accounts
belonging to NFL teams were affected. A BBC story indicated that
the third-party tool used by the hackers was Khoros, a marketing platform used
by companies to post to Twitter and better track community interaction. Khoros
has yet to respond to the allegation.