Computerworld (http://www.computerworld.com/action/article.do?command=viewArticleBasic&articleId=9115187) reports that the tactic used to access Sarah Palin’s email account last week can work work with any account that requires knowing the username and guessing the answer to a single security question. This includes Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, and many others.
All you need to know is a mother’s maiden name, name of a pet, name of high school, or a tidbit of information that is relatively personal but not impossible to find out.
Should you be concerned? I mentioned in a previous post (http://www.networkworld.comhttps://www.networkworld.com//community/node/31783) that one of my websites had been hacked. That one didn’t have a personal question (or email address) that was easy to guess, but it is definitely disconcerting to discover someone has gotten into something. So try to use personal questions that are harder to discover the answers for!
