Everyone knows that vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s Yahoo! email account was hacked into. Naturally Bill O’Reilly had something to say about that matter:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7iQQcZEJxdwWhat a mistake. He apparently does not understand the hacker mentality. “What happens when someone in the media openly criticizes hackers?” asks Dave Parrack at Tech.Blorge. “Why, they then get hacked themselves to prove a point and get revenge.”
That is exactly what happened to O’Reilly, as his site was hacked and over 200 passwords of site members were dished out around the Internet. City, state, and zipcode information was also leaked. O’Reilly bashed sites that would post such information as that obtained from the Palin hack – sites like Wikileaks, who says it’s goal is to “reveal unethical behavior in governments and corporations.”
O’Reilly called for authorities to go and arrest the people posting such information online. A Register article about the O’Reilly hack (reposted at Wikileaks) says, “It’s evident from the remark that no one bothered to tell O’Reilly that Wikileaks is a multi-national, bulletproof organization that has successfully withstood serious take-down efforts before.”
The hackers may be treading hotter water than they meant to. Some of the passwords obtained from the hack are bound to be used in a variety of other accounts for different things. Things like bank sites, PayPal, etc. One member of O’Reilly’s site even admitted that she used her password everywhere. Some of the member passwords (also on display at Wikileaks) are very weak too.
Security professionals will tell you not to use the same password for everything, and they’ll also tell you to use a combination of both letters and numbers rather than straight words. Many of the O’Reilly members failed on both counts. They have been urged to change their passwords everywhere now. So far, there have been no reports of hi-jacked accounts stemming from this incident.
