I recently appeared on Fox and Friends to talk about electronic mail hacking. Dave Briggs, a FOX & Friends Weekend co-host, lost get entry to to his Hotmail electronic mail account while hackers were capable of bet both his password or his qualifying question. (He admitted that his password changed into not as strong as it ought to had been.) The hackers locked Briggs out of his personal account and spammed all of his contacts with a fraudulent email address founder that appeared to be written via Briggs himself, claiming that he became trapped in Malaysia and asking for that a person assist him by using shifting money thru W. Union. Only after constantly contacting Hotmail administrators was Briggs capable of regain manage of his own e-mail account.
Twitter became focused by a similar hack, which led to a facts breach. It is likely that the hacker guessed the solution to a Twitter worker’s protection query and reset the worker’s password. On Wednesday, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone blogged, “About a month in the past, an administrative employee here at Twitter become centered and her personal e-mail account was hacked. From the private account, we believe the hacker was able to gain data which allowed get entry to to this employee’s Google Apps account which contained Docs, Calendars, and other Google Apps Twitter is based on for sharing notes, spreadsheets, thoughts, monetary information and extra inside the enterprise.”
And of course, Sarah Palin’s Yahoo email account became hacked into last year, at some stage in the presidential marketing campaign. The hacker defined how smooth it was in Wired.
Web-based totally e-mail rocks! Since you are now not tethered to a PC-based client, you can access your electronic mail from anywhere. And all the statistics stored for your e-mail account might be safe if your PC crashes. Many web-primarily based e mail vendors provide gigabytes of free garage and different beneficial tools like files, RSS readers, and calendars. Life in the cloud is easier and greater convenient. But is it comfy?
PC Pro reported on a look at run by means of Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University, which measured the reliability and protection of the questions that the four maximum popular web mail carriers use to reset account passwords. AOL, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo all depend on personal questions to authenticate customers who’ve forgotten their passwords. The observe discovered that the “mystery questions” used by all 4 webmail companies have been insufficiently dependable authenticators, and that the security of personal query seems much weaker than passwords themselves. Yahoo claims to have up to date all their non-public questions in response to this look at, but AOL, Google, and Microsoft have not begun to make any changed.
