TOM YUM Soup for the Soul

The world of binary codes of 1 and 0, 0 and 1 has drawn such fascination from people that it has even became a channel for crime for personal pleasure and gain. It was uncanny when just yesterday I was at a sec school in the East about hacking and cracking; of how it has evolved to a crime that is more then just targeting the device but one that targets the person; that the papers published a true story of the US vice presidential candidates Sarah Palin becoming the victim of an online prankster. Her email was hacked and some of her private information got leaked out to public.

Snippets of the articles:

"The 44-year-old Alaskan governor's personal Yahoo e-mail address was hacked on
Wednesday by the online pranksters, who are well-known in cyberspace by their group
name, Anonymous."

The hackers posted several screenshots of Yahoo e-mail messages, Mrs Palin's contact list
and some family photos to Wikileaks.com, a website which hosts leaked government
documents. The screenshots showed Mrs Palinmay have used her Yahoo e-mail
account for official business as Alaska's governor.

The McCain campaign reacted strongly to the hacking, saying in a statement: 'This is a shocking
invasion of the governor's privacy and a violation of law."

To read the whole story, please click here http://newpaper.asia1.com.sg/news/story/0,4136,177294,00.html??

Precaution

Online security expert Aloysius Cheang told The New Paper that there are precautions that
users of web-based e-mail programs like Yahoo and Gmail can take to prevent their accounts
from being hacked.

He said: 'Users should change their passwords regularly, and make sure their passwords
contain a combination of numbers and letters.

'They should also try not to log into the e-mail accounts on shared computers, or computers
they aren't familiar with.'

He added that it is especially risky to log into web-based e-mail accounts on public computer
terminals, such as those provided for passengers in transit at airports.

'These computers may have been installed with malicious software which log passwords,
then send them to the hacker,' he said.

Looks like we better be on guard with our emails. Even though we may not be the vice president but you never know when someone will do something just for fun at your expense. (",)