No matter the size of your business, you are still vulnerable to being hacked. This is something Facebook found out over the weekend after its Twitter account was temporarily breached.
The culprit of the hack was OurMine, which is a specialist organisation that focuses on hacking high-profile and celebrity accounts. It claims that this attack on Facebook’s social media was an attempt to show a number of cyber vulnerabilities.
In its post on Facebook’s Twitter page, the group states that “even Facebook is hackable”, and takes a dig at Twitter as well, saying that the platform’s security measures were worse than its rival Facebook’s.
Furthermore, the company used the social network’s Twitter page to advertise its own services, calling readers to improve their account security by contacting the group. Facebook’s account has since been restored.
Facebook itself was not hacked, and Twitter confirmed that once it was alerted to the account being hacked via a third party, it locked the account. In a statement confirming the attack, Twitter explained that once the account had been locked, it worked alongside Facebook to restore the account.
This is not OurMine’s first successful hacking of the year. Last month, the group hijacked a significant number of accounts belonging to NFL teams. These accounts appear to have been used through a platform called Khoros, which is a marketing platform to help businesses manage their social media activity. Khoros has yet to comment on the attacks.
OurMine has gained its reputation for hacking high-profile accounts of both organisations and individuals, and its hitlist also includes Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter; Sundar Pichai, the former chief executive of Google; and the accounts for ESPN and Netflix.
While it may not be doing so in a way that would make it popular among businesses, OurMine is demonstrating an important point that businesses big and small should be taking seriously – cyber security.
Businesses should be making sure that their sites, and more importantly the data they contain, are secure, as a breach can cause all kinds of headaches for a company. This include sensitive data being shared, customers losing faith and taking their custom elsewhere, and damaging the reputation of a business.
The bare minimum a company can do is to ensure they have secure passwords for their sites, which consist of multiple words and not something hopeless like Mark Zuckerberg’s ‘dadada’ from 2016. For more help and advice on keeping your site secure and running correctly, speak to Engage Web.
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