Enlarge (credit: @ChelseaGatesTV)
Online miscreants took over the National Football League’s Twitter account and used it to falsely report the death of league commissioner Roger Goodell.
During the brief span that @NFL was taken over, it followed exactly one new Twitter account—@IDissEverything, which has now been suspended. Before the account was suspended, it claimed the password protecting the NFL Twitter feed was “olsen3culvercam88.” The Daily Dot said someone connected to the IDissEverything account claimed the password was revealed after someone “managed to get into the e-mail of a social media staffer at the NFL, where we found the credentials in a message.” It’s still not clear how the group got access to the e-mail account.
Tuesday’s breach was only the latest one to affect a high-profile Twitter user. Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently saw his dormant Twitter account taken over by someone who discovered its password—”dadada”—was the same one that protected his LinkedIn account. Zuckerberg’s LinkedIn account, in turn, had been compromised in a 2012 breach of the career networking site. Other celebrities, including Katy Perry, Lana Del Rey, and Kylie Jenner have also reportedly had their Twitter accounts taken over in recent days.