It seems no famous face in the world of tech is safe, with Oculus’s CEO Brendan Iribe becoming the latest victim of a spate of hacks on social media pages.
It seems that 2016 is the year in which personal security is being brought to the forefront of the online conversation, given that we have witnessed millions of LinkedIn and Tumblr accounts being compromised by hackers since the start of this year.
Not only that, but in the past few weeks, one group of hackers called OurMine have successfully breached the security of Twitter and Quora accounts belonging to Mark Zuckerberg, Sundar Pichai and Daniel Elk, as well as others.
Obtained via MySpace breach
Rather than making their life a misery, however, the group has claimed it is doing it in the name of aggressive marketing of its services, with the aim of promoting better personal security, ironically.
Now, however, according to Tech Crunch, the CEO of Oculus, Brendan Iribe, is the latest victim of a breach, with a hacker accessing his Twitter page declaring themselves as the new CEO of Oculus, while questioning why Iribe was using a four-year-old password.
As for how this person managed to access the account, they revealed that they had managed to obtain Iribe’s password following another major breach of 427m MySpace passwords that was revealed in May.
Not part of OurMine group
Compared with the previous hacks on major tech figures, this incident appears to be unrelated to the OurMine group, whose origins remain a mystery.
While someone purporting to be a member of the group claims that it consists of three teenagers, it has denied that its origins lie in Saudi Arabia, despite an IP address linking the group to the Middle East country.
While the tweets have now been deleted and no real harm has been done to Iribe, it highlights other more serious breaches that have occurred recently, such as the auctioning off of thousands of patients records from US hospitals on the dark web.
It was later revealed that the details were only put up for sale after the person in charge of securing these files on hospital servers refused to pay a ransom to the hacker who went by the nickname, ‘TheDarkOverlord’.
Brendan Iribe image via Maryland GovPics/Flickr
