HACKED FACEBOOK ACCOUNTS MAY EXPLAIN BILLIONS OF INANE POSTS
Investigators who discovered hackers stole millions of user passwords from Facebook and other web sites said today account hijacking may finally explain the massive number of mind-numbing Facebook posts that appear on the site every day."What real person would post this?" said cyber experts.âItâs clear that malicious individuals have gotten into these accounts and, posing as the real users, posted the most useless and arbitrary things they could think of,â said CyberPicket CEO Marvin Distin. âHow else would you explain a post like, âAnother pretty sunsetâ or âWent shopping today?â Ordinary people wouldnât do that. Obviously. It must be the work of some twisted hackers who get a sadistic kick out of filling the Internet with nothing.â The stolen usernames and passwords from Facebook, Twitter and others, found on a server in the Netherlands, come from around the globe and have been collected over several years, according to CyberPicket. Facebook said it has reset the passwords for users whose accounts were compromised, but researchers are suspicious of that claim. âItâs not fixed because these inane posts keep appearing,â said Distin. âThings like, âEating breakfast at the Waffle House just outside Charlotte.â âLooking forward to the weekend!â These hackers must think weâre stupid.â As an example, Distin cited a recent post by Facebook user Kent Siboben of Lindale, Ill., who posted a picture of his new mailbox and wrote âNew mailbox!â above it. âIâm sure Mr. Siboben would never do that himself,â Distin said. However, reached via phone, Siboben admitted that he had posted the image. âYeah, that was my new mailbox,â he said. âI thought it was, well, I donât know what. Hey, a bunch of people âlikedâ it.â âMy God, this is worse than I thought,â responded Distin. âThe hackers have even infiltrated user phone numbers and are pretending to be actual people.â According to security experts, the majority of hacked accounts found on the server had âabsurdly simpleâ passwords associated with them, the most common being â123456,â followed by â123456789,â â1234,â âpasswordâ and â12345.â While some have suggested this is how hackers got into the accounts in the first place, Distin said it is more likely the infiltrators simplified the passwords.âActual people â those who knew anything about the Internet, anything at all â would never use âpasswordâ as a password,â he said. âNo, the hackers must have gotten in and changed the passwords to make it appear as if there are literally millions of incredibly moronic people on the Internet. Fortunately, this is so far from reality that we can see right through it.â