It probably didn’t take the hacking skills of Kevin Mitnick, and it certainly wasn’t worthy of a Michael Crichton techno thriller or cyberpunk epic from Bruce Stering. But the fact that Sarah Palin’s Web mail account was hacked is just proof that you can’t be too safe.
As Appscout is reporting, the account was accessed through a very basic use of trying to find words that might be associated with the Alaska Governor and Vice Presidential hopeful. According to Appscout the attack was perpetrated by 4Chan’s “random” bulletin board, which has a somewhat nefarious reputation for helping popularize online hacking.
This past Tuesday evening someone broke in Ms. Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account, read various e-mails, and posted the address and password on the board. Chaos, to put it bluntly, ensued.
So what did future Vice President Governor Palin do wrong? Well, the mistakes she made were the typical sorts of rookie mistakes that are often made. Don’t use the name of your hometown for your password, don’t use the birthdays of your children and don’t use your street address.
These are bad enough when you’re Joe Nobody, but when you’re possibly a heart beat away from the President of the United States that’s another issue all together. Still for small and medium businesses, including those were bios of key employees are posted on the company Web site it is especially important to remember. For example if your bio says, “graduated from University of Michigan,” it might not be a good idea to have a password such as “Michigan,” “uofm” or even “mgoblue.”
A hacker with enough time on his or her hands will think of these things. And for the same reasons it is a good idea not to use the same password for all your online accounts. In fact many experts would argue that it is probably not even a good idea to use the same user name for all your accounts.
Of course a hacker with enough time could hack almost anything. But the key is slowing them down is the key. While a hacker might spend all night on Sarah Palin, most users should be diligent enough to get the hacker to move on to someone else.