Palin’s Yahoo Mail Account Hacked – A Lesson to Learn

By Muhammad Ali Raza · Thursday, Oct 16, 2008 0 Comments

Alaska Governor and republican Vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s quasi-personal Yahoo Mail (~censerd~@yahoo.com) account was hacked by the infamous group called “Anonymous”. The hackers’ crew post her personal info on net to let every one see what her personal life is. This is very worst case – like most of the time hackers usually don’t post evidence of there attacks. She is denying the facts but we if assume that this is real then this can be archived by lots of method.

• Password guessing / brute force attacks
• Password recovery system flaw or website vulnerability
• Network sniffers
• Phishing scams
• Insider (rouge customer service representation or software backdoor)
• Operating System Malware/Spyware
• Stolen hardware
• Lost backup tape (hah, as if free WebMail providers have backups!)
• Use of a public computer or many other ways we can’t even think about

There is no solid, or say a perfect way to secure you critical information, yes, sadly its true -  but what you can do is to follow few things very strictly while surfing on internet.

If a hacker wants to break in to your security, he/she will do this by any means – but its in your hand to give hacker a tough time.

Some steps you can follow are to Not to Post your personal info on Blogs – Don’t use weak passwords, here strong password doesn’t mean any special characters or 23 digits password, but don’t use your phone number, family name, school related information or id card number.

I have seen people using there mobile number as a password, or their name then mobile number.
I must tell you here that there are some software available that generates password list if you put info of target person, such as their name, phone numbers, their city name, family name etc.

Other very crucial thing is to not to put your resume on internet social networking websites.
Update your OS (Operating System) and applications to patch latest security threats. Do use anti-viruses and firewalls to keep your self away from this crap. You can’t stop hacker to break in but you can make them slow to break in change your password monthly or weekly.

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Tags: email, hacking, Internet, Security, yahoo