Security & Privacy + Software & Apps

You may have heard that Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account was hacked. The hacker made public some information regarding those accounts, including screen shots of their inboxes to prove that he or she indeed got access to them. This raises a serious question: is your web mail password safe? Palin’s account wasn’t so much “hacked” as “social engineered”. The hacker used Yahoo!’s “I forgot my password” feature, and simply guessed the answer to the “secret question” she had set up as a security check.

Rob Griffiths, writing at Macworld, looks at how this break-in occurred and what you need to do to protect yourself from a similar security breach. One of the most important things to consider is how public the information required to get through the “secret question” is. In Palin’s case, the question was “Where did you meet your spouse?”. This is something that anyone can find using Google. She’s a public figure, so that information is repeated in many locations, but your may have posted similar information on Facebook, MySpace or your personal web site.

Read this article for more tips on keeping your online passwords personal. Since so much of your activity depends on this access – which is often just a public e-mail address and a password – you owe it to yourself to make sure these passwords are secure.