TAG | How not to get hacked like Sarah Palin |
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| by Alex Zaharov-Reutt | |
| Saturday, 20 September 2008 | |
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Page 2 of 3 The simple solution, especially if there is a lot of information about you on the Internet, is to not use answers to questions that could be found out through searching on Google. Featured Whitepaper
5 Best Practices for Smartphone Support
So... when asked questions like “What is your mother’s maiden name” or “What is the name of your dog”, why not try simple things like reversing the order of the answer, and adding in some numbers that you would remember? Let’s say your dog’s name is Fido, and your uncle was born in 1933. Well, you could have something like F1i9d3o3 as the answer, but better still, add some other details, too. If 412193 is your frequent flyer number (a number I just made up), then you could add that to the end or the start of the previous answer - 412193F1i9d3o3. Yes, this adds complexity, but it’s all that seemingly stands between the security of your Yahoo email account and anyone (even a spouse or other relative) being able to break in and go through all your personal emails. If there are multiple questions you can choose from, why not choose one that isn’t the usual, and make sure that your answer is something very difficult to guess, while mixing in numbers or even symbols for good measure? Yes, you’ll still need to remember this in the future if you ever need to reset your password. But having a much harder to crack/guess password is just simple common sense. The whole episode is also a wake-up call to Yahoo and all other online service providers to dramatically beef up their security practices to make such attacks far more difficult - I can only imagine that the IT security people at Yahoo Mail are investigating this right now, but so should all the other online services. But it's also a wake-up call to us, all the users of the Internet, to start taking online security much, much more seriously. The other well known but little followed tip is to not use the same password for all your online accounts! What software is available to help you manage your passwords, commercial and free? Please read on to page 3. |
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