The recent incident involving Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! e-mail account highlights how easy it is for some one to exploit the weakest link in the security chain. You could use the most random set of alphabets, digits and symbols as your password and still get hacked!

I just tried to access my own, infrequently used, Yahoo account without the password. What I discovered was that any one with the following information about me could easily reset the password and gain full access in a few minutes.

• The yahoo account name (this is the part before the @ in the Yahoo email-id)
• The country of residence
• birthday
• Postal code
• The answer to where I first met my spouse

If you use Yahoo email, immediately check how vulnerable you are to some one resetting your password. If you think your account is vulnerable, change your security question and answer.

How do you change the security question of your yahoo account?

The strange part is that changing the security question and answer is much more complicated! It can’t be done even if you are logged into your Yahoo account! Apparently you have to send an email to a Yahoo support account to get this done. Check this Yahoo answer for more details.

When you pick an answer for the security question, don’t answer it truthfully. Instead, make up an answer only you will know.

What about Hotmail, Google?

Unlike Yahoo, Google seems to have a more secure procedure for resetting the password. I am not sure about Hotmail because I don’t use it. If you have a Hotmail account, try the "forgotten" password link and check the procedure involved.