Password Recovery Questions Make Online Accounts Vulnerable

Martin — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 20:19:54 +0000

Password recovery questions are great to recover a forgotten password in a matter of seconds. All that needs to be done is to answer the password recovery question to receive a new password in the email inbox. This does however make email hacking a profitable business as email accounts are usually connected to online stores and other web services. Attackers with access to a compromised email account only need to answer the secret question to retrieve the password of the web account. This matter is definitely more secure than sending out the password without confirmation on the user’s request.

A recent study shows on the other hand that password recovery questions are usually answered honestly. Questions about the birth town, mother’s maiden name or first animal name can sometimes be easily guesses. The study asked acquaintances of 32 webmail users to guess the answer to the secret question. Roughly 20% of these answers were guessed correctly.

Password recovery questions should therefor not be answered honestly. Experienced users fill them out with password like characters which makes the answers more or less impossible to guess. These answers can then be stored in password managers as notes.

How do you handle password recovery questions?

Tags: accounts, Email, online security, password recovery, password recovery questions, passwords, secret questions, Security

Fun and cool way to manage multiple twitter accounts

Daniel Pataki — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 08:30:16 +0000

I stumbled on to a service for managing multiple twitter accounts and at first I thought it was going to be one of those second rate sites, I was put off a bit by the 16×16 logo I saw on the referring page. However when I got to Matt I was instantly pulled in.This is a site with a truly unique and fun style, which allows you to very effectively manage a whole load of Twitter accounts while your at it.

You can simply add accounts while Gobo the account manager introduces himself, and once that’s done you can send tweets by simply typing out your tweet and selecting which account you want to submit it to. The cool thing is that you can send to multiple accounts, so you won’t have to type or copy paste messages multiple times.

The only negative thingI have found during my tweeting is that my messages tend to be delayed by about 3 minutes. This is not an error, you can see your tweet’s status being queued, I guess they just have too much traffic. I can live with that 3 minutes though, and although I don’t have multiple accounts yet, I will still use Matt for Twittering because of its design.

Tags: accounts, management, twitter

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Password Recovery Questions Make Online Accounts Vulnerable

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