Hi All,
For those of you using web-based email services such as Yahoo, AOL, Gmail, Hotmail, etc. – please take a moment to change your password to something harder for an automated spambot to guess.
The majority of people tend to use a simple name or word as their password. These are guessed in less than a second by a spambot using a “dictionary file” – a list of words to try.
Adding a capital letter, a number, or a special character such as #, $, % or similar, makes it EXPONENTIALLY harder to crack your password. They have to “brute force attack” the account by trying all possible combination of characters, in all possible lengths. This can take months or more. As a computer security guy, I occasionally have to do both methods to recover credentials for various encrypted files – so I know how it’s done.
If you’re not concerned about a spammer getting access to your email, consider this. They can gain complete access to your account, so can see any emails you have received from your bank. They can, and do, sometimes use the “I forgot my password” feature to get a new password or password-reset email sent to your account, which they can then use to drain you dry.
This holds true for all email of course – a secure password is important on any account – but the major web-based email providers are the biggest target of the spammers.
Please take a moment to consider the above, and make sure you have a secure password!
-Dave
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