Don't need to be a hacker to hack an email account

I'm sure most of you have heard that GOP vice-president candidate Sarah Palin's Yahoo account was "hacked" into. Well, apparently the hacker didn't even need to resort to actual hacking. The hacker with help from the group he belongs to used Yahoo's password recovery feature. It's a pretty standard one. You set security questions and answer them. Once correct, it lets you in and you can change your password. Palin used questions that referred to her birthdate and where she met her husband. Quick searches on Wikipedia and online yielded the answers.

So what's the lesson? If you are famous or just pretty active in the online community (Facebook, MySpace, blogs, etc.), try not to use questions with answers that can be researched quickly. My favorite strategy is to pick a random question like "What is the name of your dog?" and answer it with a totally unrelated word. So the name of your dog could be "Lemon Herb Roasted Chicken" or something equally ridiculous like "Your mama". That should do the trick.

In this day an age, you can't be too careful with your online security!