An US Vice Presidential candidate recently had her Yahoo Mail account hacked into. Is your own webmail account safe from hackers? Yahoo Mail isn’t the only Web-based mail service that could be duped into giving up someone else’s account password. Google’s Gmail, Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail and Yahoo Mail are all vulnerable.
How does the breach happen?
All webmail services rely on automated password reset mechanisms that can be abused by anyone who knows the username associated with an account and an answer to a single security question such as:
What is your mother’s maiden name?
What is the name of the city in which you were born?
What is the name of your favourite pet?
If you have given truthful answers to any of such questions while opening your webmail account, then your email account can be easily broken into by any ordinary person who knows the answers to these questions.
Some of the personal information that would provide answers to the security questions would be easily found in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook or Orkut. And the hacker can use this answer to break into your account to reset your password and lock you out of your own webmail account.
How can you protect your account?
You can easily avoid having your webmail account hacked with some simple security practices. If a webmail service (or for that matter any internet service) asks you for an answer to a security question, don’t tell it the truth! Honesty is not always the best policy! Or select such a question whose answer cannot be found by anyone. But whatever answer you do give, remember it yourself !!
