As an update to last night’s post on Jim and my friend who had her GMail and Blogger accounts hacked into. Michael Arrington was amazingly helpful in making some progress with GMail. We haven’t made progress on the Blogger side, yet.
First, I want to clarify from my earlier post. It looks like my friend didn’t choose the best password in the world and it was probably cracked with a brute force dictionary attack. There isn’t much a host can do when users use bad passwords, like a single word that can be found in the dictionary.
On the password front, yes they are hard to remember. Yes there isn’t a great way to manage all your passwords. But for picking a password I recommend starting and ending with a number (or two) and even putting in something like "!" in as well. Do I forget passwords? All the freakin’ time.
This whole incident has got me thinking though. Okay, someone gains access to your account. Now, once in there, not only can they change the password, they can can change the security question and even the backup e-mail address that you might have provided (for services like GMail). So what can you do?
No doubt a lot of damage can be done if someone hijacks your blog, and with all the e-mail you might have stored in GMail … a lot of other damage as well. The question is, then, what can be done? Do the major blogging services (Typepad, Blogger, WordPress, Blogware) have ways to handle this quickly? I know from trying to help a One By One Media client (AudaciousLady) with being able to fix a Blogger problem that Blogger never got back to us.
So as my friend works to regain control of her GMail account … let’s hope Blogger gets resolved quickly. And then, let’s see if the other blog hosts could address this head on.
Tags: online security, passwords
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My blog has been restored, and many thanks to you and your friends, dear Jim. I’m still waiting for Gmail to get back to me with any kind of helpful information.