By Jeremy Maxwell and Dr. Annie I. Antón

Hackers recently broke into Governor Palin’s personal Yahoo email account and, subsequently, several of personal emails and family photos were posted on the internet [See: BBC Article].
This recent case reminds us that we must be careful with the information we divulge online as well as the information that is requested of us online. Consider that the responsible hacker was able to guess Governor Palin’s answers to the security questions that Yahoo used by doing some simple Internet searching [See: PCWorld].

This attack could be considered a social engineering attack [See: Social Engineering Fundamentals]–– social engineering attacks are not technical attacks, but instead aim to trick the victim into divulging personal information. Phishing and trojan horses are also examples of social attacks. The Governor Palin attack, however, is similar to the attack described by Herbert Thompson, where an attacker can gain access to user accounts simply by using information available on the internet, usually using some sort of password resetting service that asks personal questions to validate the identity of the user. If this private information is well known, than anyone could impersonate the identity of the victim. Sources of information can include public records such as driving or court records, blogs, social networking websites, personal websites, etc. The lesson here is to avoid posting private information in a public setting. Most people would not post their Social Security number or the password to their email account on their blog, but the information they do post might be enough.

So before you post the name of your first pet on Facebook or MySpace or on your blog, think about whether it can be used to fraudulently impersonate you at a later date.

[Update: Fixed minor grammar error]

This entry was posted by Jeremy Maxwell (jcmaxwe3@ncsu.edu) on Tuesday, September 23rd, 2008 at 5:16 pm and is filed under Identity Theft. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.