Why Your Personal Accounts Online May be Vulnerable
By Rico, 3:03 pm Sun Sep 7 2008 - Tips & Tricks - 1 Opinion
Filipinos are a pretty expressive lot, including about themselves, and that may work against their favor. A recent article in Scientific American was about how easy it was to commit identity theft, specifically how easy it was to get into people’s other personal online accounts used to handle email and even banking!
The weak link in the chain, according to author Herbert H. Thompson, is the wealth of personal information available on people’s blogs, and profiles on sites like MySpace (think Multiply and Friendster, folks).
To be clear, this isn’t hacking or exploiting vulnerabilities, instead it’s mining the Internet for nuggets of personal data. Here’s one case. I share it here because it represents some of the common pitfalls and illustrates a pretty serious weakness that most of us have online.
To make a long story short, Herbert was able to access his “victim’s” banking account by figuring out what email she used to manage it. It was then a simple matter of figuring out the password for the email account. So what can you do to better protect yourself?
- Don’t use an easy “forgot your password?” question. Websites usually ask those trying to recover their forgotten passwords a question that only they supposedly know the answer to, like “what’s the name of your first pet?” Unfortunately, many people choose a question that’s easy to guess an answer for.
- Be careful about what you put online! With everyone blogging and on social networking sites like Multiply and Friendster, think before you share any personal detail. Once it’s online, it’s hard—if not impossible—to take it down.
- Don’t manage everything with one email account. There’s always a chance someone will manage to break into one of your email accounts. Once that happens, if you manage everything through that email address, the stranger will practically have access to all of your accounts.
- Don’t reveal your email address(es). Aside from potentially saving you from a lot spam, keeping your email address(es) secret makes it that much harder for other people to figure it out.
Go anything useful to share? Feel free to leave an opinion, and let’s make ourselves safer! Thanks to reader Josh for the tip.
David
9:09 pm Tue Sep 9 2008
Yup, and that’s one way for potential hijackers to compromise your domain name account as well. I’ve included bits of that in my report on the subject, though I’m still refining it.