NFL says hackers falsely tweeted Roger Goodell died

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. (KGO) -- For a few brief moments Wednesday morning, NFL fans thought the league's commissioner had died.

It was a tweet from the NFL informing fans that commissioner Roger Goodell had passed away at age 57.

ESPN confirmed it was fake, but the hackers kept tweeting until they were locked out.

Twitter released a statement saying: "We know far too many people use the same password for multiple things online."

It was a hoax of course, but this is just the latest in a growing list of hacking attacks on social media.

Experts say it's a problem that's not fixing itself. The number of user names and passwords we have to remember grows dramatically each year. And while smartphones have plenty of memory to spare, our brains don't.

Avast makes security software, including a password manager. You unlock it with your fingerprint, and create an entry for each website. You can also create random unique passwords for every single one of them.

They study big breaches like the one at LinkedIn in 2012 where usernames and passwords wound up for sale on the dark Internet.

That breach is blamed for the eventual hacks on Mark Zuckerberg who may have been using the same password on other sites. "Most of these high profile celebrities are just like any other consumer, they also manage and maintain multiple accounts, user names and passwords, and they struggle to come up with new complex passwords for every single one of them," Avast Mobile Enterprise General Manager Sinan Eren said.

Many websites now offer two-factor authentication, a code sent to your phone to make sure it's really you.

Like a password manager, it's an extra step, but users say they're waiting for something better.