Follow
Brendan Iribe, the co-founder of the Oculus system and Chief Executive Officer of Oculus VR Inc, is currently a man with a considerably big pull in tech communities. His decisions decide the future of the Oculus and of the virtual reality world.
What kind of man decides the future of the Oculus?
It may come surprising to some to learn that a man in such an influential decision was still using his old MySpace account password for several other current accounts.
It may also come as a surprise to find out that with such a quite old and recycled password, Brendan Iribe had no additional forms of security, such as two-factor authentication. Well, both facts were entirely true, at least in the case of Iribe’s Twitter account.
On the evening of Wednesday, June 29th, Oculus CEO’s 16K Twitter followers witnessed the hacking.
Through the newly obtained account, the hacker openly announced their surprise in regards to Iribe’s low security. They also stated that they simply tried out a password found on a public leaked database.
The password was linked to Iribe’s MySpace account, meaning that the password’s age could vary between 4 and 13 years. Hacked database information is currently available publicly to anyone as long as they know what sites to use or what terms to search in their browser.
Apart from jokingly (hopefully) asking for a free Oculus from the CEO as the ransom for the safe return of his Twitter account, the hacker also tweeted that the same password seemed to work on Iribe’s e-mail account. Two-factor authentication was used with the e-mail’s password, however, and the hacker did not bother in trying to progress further than that.
Password management is realistically one of the biggest issues users are faced with.
For optimal security, users should change their passwords every six months, with some websites suggesting changes as frequent as every three months.
A safe password should also contain at least one uppercase character, one lowercase character, one number, and one special character.
While many sites allow logging in with other services, such as Facebook, Google, or even Twitter, it is more secure to first sign-up with an individual account and then connect them to the other service.
All passwords, passkeys, PINs, and the such should also not be noted down and remembered, implying that they should be logical and easy to remember.
Average comfort, along with the sheer number of accounts users have makes the process of making and updating unique passwords wholly troublesome.
While Twitter helped out the Oculus CEO and restored his account in a matter of hours, the rest of the world does not get to be that lucky. How do you keep your accounts safe? Let us know.
Image Courtesy of Brendan Iribe’s Twitter.
