His followers challenged him to have his own companies' pages deleted, which he did within minutes.

Mr Musk said he "didn't realise" that his SpaceX brand had a Facebook page. "Literally never seen it even once," he wrote on Twitter. "Will be gone soon."

"Looks lame," he replied. Both profiles disappeared within minutes of his posts.

That outrage had many users vowing to shut down or at least abandon their Facebook accounts, while a selloff in Facebook stock hacked as much as $35 billion from the company’s market capitalization by March 20.

“I've been working to understand exactly what happened and how to make sure this doesn't happen again,” Zuckerberg said in a statement released on Facebook.

Apparently the company is willing to wait until the next breach to fix whatever else turns up, rather than working to determine what weaknesses exist, and fixing them before they become a breach.

“It’s horrifying how much they know,” he told the Guardian, on the condition of anonymity. “You go into Facebook and it has this warm, fuzzy feeling of ‘we’re changing the world’ and ‘we care about things’. But you get on their bad side and all of a sudden you are face to face with [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg’s secret police.”

It’s a similar story at Google. Staff use an internal version of Google Plus and thousands of mailing lists to discuss everything from homeownership to items for sale, as well as social issues like neoconservatism and diversity.

One European Facebook content moderator signed a contract, seen by the Guardian, which granted the company the right to monitor and record his social media activities, including his personal Facebook account, as well as emails, phone calls and internet use. He also agreed to random personal searches of his belongings including bags, briefcases and car while on company premises.

Industry insiders fear that, without agreement, the Whois service, which publicly lists full contact details of domain-name registrants, will effectively shut down in order to avoid fines and possible lawsuits under the Euro rules.

That would leave law enforcement and intellectual property lawyers, among others, unable to access registrant details, and potentially give cybercriminals a larger window to carry out crimes.

Starting with the April 17 release of Google's Chrome 66 browser, all SSL/TLS certificates that Symantec issued prior to June 1, 2016, will be flagged by Chrome as unsafe, as well as those issued by Symantec-owned brands such as Verisign, Thawte and Equifax.

Starting with Chrome 70, all websites with SSL/TLS certificates that Symantec issued after June 1, 2016, will be impacted in the same way. Google will release the First Canary of Chrome 70 on July 20.

The firm put some context on that data by noting that 50.2 per cent of the world's web sites don't run a content management system (CMS) at all. That means WordPress has over 60 per cent share among web sites that do run a CMS.

WordPress' success can be attributed to its ease of use and extensibility. The tool takes mere minutes to learn and allows plug-ins that make it very customisable.

The email was sent on Tuesday by the CEO of Trustico, a UK-based reseller of TLS certificates issued by the browser-trusted certificate authorities Comodo and, until recently, Symantec.

A CEO being able to attach the keys for 23,000 certificates to an email raises troubling concerns that those types of best practices weren't followed. (There's no indication the email was encrypted, either, although neither Trustico nor DigiCert provided that detail when responding to questions.)

On Wednesday, at about 12:15pm ET, 1.35 terabits per second of traffic hit the developer platform GitHub all at once.

Within 10 minutes it had automatically called for help from its DDoS mitigation service, Akamai Prolexic. Prolexic took over as an intermediary, routing all the traffic coming into and out of GitHub, and sent the data through its scrubbing centers to weed out and block malicious packets. After eight minutes, attackers relented and the assault dropped off.

Akamai reported that it has seen multiple sets of memcached reflection attacks, with some that were approximately 190 Gbps of attack traffic. Arbor Networks reported that it is seeing memcached attacks that are even larger.

There are several things that can be done to help mitigate the risk of memcached reflection attacks. The most obvious thing that should be done is for organizations to not expose their memcached services to the public internet.

"The most surprising thing is probably the string growth in HPKP [HTTP public key pinning], a technology being abandoned by many and soon Google Chrome too," Helme told El Reg.

Experts including Helme and Ivan Ristic have criticised the technology as being both tricky to apply and potentially calamitous, if incorrectly set up.