It's not hard to hack some people's accounts. If they can find your e-mail address and know your name they can often gather enough information from public databases to hack your account. This is especially true for accounts where if the password fails you're asked a security question. In some cases those questions are ridiculously easy to hack. School mascot, mother's maiden name, birthplace, etc. are all pieces of information that can be easily found if you know who someone is. Many security questions are based on questions like those.
You can defeat those issues by using strong passwords and answering the security questions in ways that are gooblygook. If your school mascot was a Falcon, you don't necessarily have to answer "Falcon" when you initially answer the question. If you enter something completely irrelevant as the answer to the security questions you can foil many hacking attempts. A simple solution if you don't want to remember the gobblygook answers is to use the correct answer, but spell it backwards, or use all capital letters, or half capital letter and half lower case letters. Do something to make it harder for the hackers to guess correctly.
Given just a name and e-mail address and an hour or so of poking around the web, pretty much anyone can hack into certain websites where the security questions are easy to research. Once they get in, they can then change your e-mail address and create absolute chaos for you.
The data that exists on each of us, and that's available for free or a small fee, is pretty mind-numbing. If you were a student athlete, band member, member of honor society, etc. chances are a simple search of your name will turn up what high school you attended. Once you know the name of the school determining the school mascot is a breeze. Hackers will know the security questions certain web sites use and target getting the answers to those questions. Sites like ancestry.com can quickly let a hacker know your mother's maiden name, your birthplace, etc.
An experienced hacker with some time and minimal knowledge of you, can pretty quickly gather the answers to the security quesitons they'll encounter by guessing wrong on your password. Once they have that information and have access to your account, you're in all kinds of trouble. Some just take a shortcut and try to talk their way into your account through a naive customer service rep. They'll call up and try to get the rep to let them in claiming their old e-mail account is gone and they forgot their password. In some cases it works. You've just got to make it as hard on the bad guys as you can.
Fly!!! Eagles!!! Fly!!!
Blogs & Forums
Forums
Blogs
