Here’s How Celebrity Twitter Accounts Are Getting Hacked

Over the past month, the Twitter accounts of everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Drake to deceased Beatle George Harrison have been hacked.

Some of those accounts, one of the most prolific hackers tells The Daily Beast, were taken over by an alarmingly simple method that could work on anyone—and not just celebrities—who has had a Myspace or LinkedIn account at any point.

J5Z, a hacker who gained access to the accounts of Harrison along with over a dozen other celebrities, including Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards and Justin Bieber producer Dan Kanter, said his method requires nothing more than access to one website and 76 cents.

That website is LeakedSource.com, which compiles the databases for publicly available hacks of usernames, passwords, and email addresses from every major website security breach over the last few years. The site includes results from 360 million Myspace accounts leaked in Mayand 117 million LinkedIn accounts that were breached in 2012.

This makes hackers’ jobs easy: J5Z only needs a single piece of identifying information—say, an email address or a similar username from an old site that’s previously been hacked, like Myspace. For a musician like Bon Iver, whom J5Z hacked, he’ll check his old Myspace username. For a businessman, a hacker might use an old email for his LinkedIn account. For the full article click here 

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