Oculus chief latest social media hack victim

Oculus boss is latest in long line of tech executives to fall victim to hack attack

The chief executive of Facebook-owned virtual reality company Oculus, Brendan Iribe, has become the latest in a string of company bosses to have their social media accounts hacked.

The Oculus boss had his Twitter account compromised, but it is now restored.

Google's Sundar Pichai, Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg, Uber's Travis Kalanick and Twitter's Dick Costolo have all fallen victim to similar hacks.

Hacking group OurMine has claimed responsibility for many of these hacks.

It does not appear to be behind the hacking of Mr Iribe's Twitter page though.

His account was compromised on 29 June, with the hacker announcing himself as the "new CEO" of Oculus and questioning why the chief executive behind "such cool technology" had been using a four-year-old password.

The hacker later told technology news site Tech Crunch that he had accessed the password via a MySpace breach.

Hundreds of millions of hacked account details from MySpace and Tumblr have been advertised for sale online in recent months although those breaches were several years ago.

Teenage hackers?

Hacking group OurMine has claimed responsibility for hacking the Twitter and Quora accounts of Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg's Twitter account, and those of Amazon's chief technology officer Werner Vogels and Spotify founder Daniel Ek.

It was likely groups such as OurMine had got their hands on passwords by "sifting through data from mega-breaches such as LinkedIn's", computer security consultant Graham Cluley said.

Social network LinkedIn was hacked in 2012. And, in May, it emerged a data set containing more than 100 million members' emails and passwords had been released online.

"This data is out there and plenty of people, not just CEOs, are at risk," said Mr Cluley.

OurMine told Tech Crunch it was a group of three teenage hackers wishing to promote better security practices.

But, in some of its hacks, it has been linking to its website offering to scan the security of social media accounts for a fee.

Mr Cluley advised users to follow basic password management, such as:

• having different passwords for every account

• enabling two-factor authentication where available

• using either very strong passwords or a password management program

The fact some of the technology bosses had not done this was surprising, he said.

"If you are responsible for a large company, a hack like these is going to be embarrassing and there will be damage to your brand," he said.

"Mark Zuckerberg is one of the most famous geeks in the world - he should know this stuff."

It has emerged Mr Zuckerberg's Twitter password was "dadada".