Founder of Facebook gets hacked

So the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, had his Facebook account hacked. Should we worry?

Well, that depends.

The average Facebook user should've been worried a long time ago. This isn't because of the flaw which enabled Mark Zuckerberg to get hacked. Instead, this is because the average Facebook user is a security nightmare.

Mark Zuckerberg's account got hacked (allegedly) because of a bug in the Facebook software. Most other Facebook users get hacked because they haven't protected their accounts.

Most people use simple passwords, such as "password". Or something easy to guess if you know the person, like their pet's name, or their boyfriends surname, or their hometown.

Some people are a little more secure and use some other random word which takes a matter of minutes for brute force software to go through the dictionary trying everything.

I'm not going to go into how to choose a secure password, there's enough advice already around on the internet about that.

The other reason that the average Facebook user should've been worried a long time ago is becdcause so many of them are providing all kinds of personal details to the general public or to people they have forgotten they've allowed into their "trusted" network or hadn't realised they'd allowed into their trusted network.

Facebook has received a lot of criticism over it's privacy model, but the best privacy setting on Facebook is this one:

"If you don't want the whole world to know, don't put it on the internet".

Quite simple really.

PleaseRobMe.com demonstrated the danger of publishing too much information to social networks by advertising the times of day that various people were not at home. This was all public information which the users had voluntarily released to the general public. PleaseRobMe.com were just bringing people's attention to the danger by using an explicit web address.

The sad truth is that most people have completely ignored PleaseRobMe.com's warnings are are still using FourSquare and other websites to broadcast their location to the whole world (along with lots of other sensitive information).

But what about those of us who actively think about our security and are aware of what we are and are not broadcast to the world. Should we be worried about Mark Zuckerberg being hacked?

Well, no more than usual. Hundreds of websites are hacked every day. Mark Zuckerberg was just a very high profile case and was probably targetted because of his high profile.

The exposed bug will be very quickly closed to prevent it happening again. But other bugs with arise on this, and many other website. It will never stop, you just have to look after yourself.

If you are promoting your business using social networks, contact OpenGlobal to make sure that you're not exposing too much personal information or business critical data.