Skip to main content ↑ ↓
Topic: Trivial email passwords may cause you to be Moderated (Read 453 times) previous topic - next topic
0 Members and 1 Guest are viewing this topic.

Trivial email passwords may cause you to be Moderated

Yahoo Message Number: 78578
Dear CCO Members,

Trivial email account passwords can be hacked. If you use web-mail with your provider and your contacts (including this Yahoo group) are kept in your web-mail address book, a hacker can gain access to your email account and send spam messages to all your contacts -- if it has a trivial password. The short email message usually contains a URL to a website for drugs, girls, or cause a virus infection on the recipients PC.
As moderator, Yahoo has reported five spam messages from hacked email accounts, sent to our forum in the past 24 hours.
I place members who have triggered these alerts on MODERATION, to prevent improper postings of future spam messages from them that Yahoo might not detect.
In this day and age, we should never use trivial passwords -- such as "password", "butch", "wendy", or other words that can be found in a dictionary, or on lists of common trivial passwords.
Set your passwords to contain upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation. Consider different passwords for various accounts (there are techniques to vary, and remember, the unique passwords).
But at the very least pick a couple of passwords to use (one in general, and a different one for financial institutions). Pick a phrase that you can remember: "I ate at Kentucky Fried Turkey today." and set your password to "I8@KFT2d.". The password for your bank accounts could then be "I9@KFT3d." by adding one to each number.

Now go pick your own phrase and protect your accounts.
You don't want someone sending emails out from your account saying that you had to make an unexpected trip to Europe and had your documents stolen and you would appreciate that they wire $2,000!!! And you find that you are totally locked out of your email because the crooks change the password and added a forwarding address on your account.

Herb

Group Moderator