Oculus CEO Brendan Iribe’s personal Twitter account was hacked late last night by an anonymous insurgent who quickly used the opportunity to dethrone the virtual reality executive.
In his place, the hacker named a Twitter user known as @Lid as the company’s new CEO. Lid’s response to suddenly receiving one of the most coveted positions in the tech world was slightly less than enthusiastic.
Lid himself was later revealed to be the architect behind the incident when he changed Iribe’s Twitter bio to read “hey its @Lid… im not testing ya security im just havin a laugh.”
In a DM interview with TechCrunch, Lid explained that he gained access to Iribe’s account via the massive MySpace breach that occurred last month. During that attack over 360 million MySpace email and password combinations were made public. One of these, apparently, was Iribe’s.
Iribe, it would seem, uses the same password for his current Twitter as he did for his MySpace even though he, like the rest of the world, probably hasn’t glanced at the service in years. It was therefore a simple matter for Lid to drop Iribe’s semi-public Oculus email, combined with the leaked MySpace password, into Twitter and voila – instant identity theft.
Lid also revealed to TechCrunch that he attempted to gain access to Iribe’s email account as well. The same password apparently got him through the first level of security to access the account. For most of the world that would be enough for Lid to send and read any email of Iribe’s he liked, but the Oculus CEO is a bit more protective of that information and had enabled a two-factor authentication that blocked Lid’s efforts.
Despite being thwarted on the email front, Lid was not above ribbing Iribe for the irony of him being a tech CEO and using the same password on multiple accounts over many years.
Iribe is certainly not the only one person in the world that uses an obvious password. We could all benefit from doing what I’m sure he himself is currently working on – creating a few new passwords for our most valuable accounts.
Constant vigilance everyone.
