I’m still in catch up mode from being offline all last week, but I have to chime in on this whole Palin’s email account being hacked thingy. The right wants you to believe some massive hacker fiddled his way through cyberspace, altering bits and warping the very space-time continuum in order to hack into Palin’s email account at Yahoo. Sounds like a scene out of Live Free or Die Hard, or even War Games. Oh so scary.

The problem is that it was nothing like that. She had an account on Yahoo, which has been a hackers favorite target for years. Back in the hay days of Yahoo Chat, people lost accounts and a daily basis through hacks. Yahoo has done a little to make their accounts more secure, but not much.

PC Magazine has taken a look into this and published a decent article putting it out in laymen terms. Basically all you need to know is some personal information about a person in order to get their account. That’s apparently what the hacker did. Information like that isn’t hard to come by either when the victim is in the public spotlight.

So what happens if your account or mine ends up falling victim to some bored hacker? Do we receive the full investigative force of the federal government? Absolutely not. This is a tax payer luxury only afforded to people of high power – like the Governor of Alaska.

Oh and if you are wondering how to protect yourself from such a simple hack, that answer is simple. Don’t use actual information for the password recovery forms. I never use actual information. Instead I use some items I came up with years ago and it’s never the same between any two sites. Instead I keep a nice notebook with it all written down. That’s not some super secret thing I learned in my three decades of software development. It is nothing more than simple common sense – something we would want our people of power to posses.