Christine asked me this question concerning people using your e-mail or/and AIM. The answer is yes but the level of difficulty is dependent on your password and your awareness. If your password is diffcult and not easy to guess, unwanted intruders will have a hard time in guessing your password. And if you are smart, you will not give it away freely either.
Easily someone can figure out your login process just based on your e-mail. It is a matter of guessing it. There are about
1. Brute force attack: Some who has a lot of time an patience can attempted to guess your password but manually entering into your login password until they find a match.
2. Social Engineering: Sometimes a sweeting talking guy or gal can convience you to give them your password or convience an IT person in changing the password for you.
3. Hacking the ISP: There have been famous (or should I say, infamous) hacks (or cracks) where hackers have retrieved other people's password, credit card information, etc.
4. Key-recording: Someone plants software on your machine and records your keystroke (which means your userid and password is recorded). Of course, information that is record must be transmitted or stored somewhere.
So how do you protect yourself.
1. Change your password. I am not talk about 30 days because sometimes that is very difficult.
2. If you don't want to change your password, make it hard to guess but easy to remember. Take advantage of password tricks. Does the password accept symbols and numbers. Is Capital letters different from lowercase letters (which means, A is different that a in coming up with a password) One trick I like to do is replace all of the vowels with something else. a=@, e=3, i=!, o=0 (the zero), u=* or something like that. Other trick it to pick two small words and merging it together. i.e. using cat and dog will equal cdaotg.
3. Update your viruses scanner. There are viruses that will install programs that might record your information and send that information to central repository area (on the internet).
4. Do not write your password down.
5. Do not use an personal information (like boyfriend's name, SS#, birthdate, age, any relatives, etc).
Well, that is all for password security. If you have any comments, questions, clarifications, please let post and share with the rest of the community.
Jerry
