Doggonit! Romney's E-mail Possibly Hacked
Hacker Apparently Guessed Right at Security Question
An unnamed hacker claims to have cracked Mitt Romney's personal Hotmail account by correctly answering the security question: "What is your favorite pet?" That's according to a tipster who alerted the website Gawker.
See Also: The Cybersecurity Swiss Army Knife for Info Guardians: ISO/IEC 27001
The answer wasn't provided by Gawker, but a lot of news coverage has been given to the story of the Republican presumptive presidential candidate strapping his dog Seamus to the roof of his car on a family vacation.
Gawker alerted the Romney campaign, which issued a statement: "The proper authorities are investigating this crime and we will have no further comment on it."
The e-mail account, mittromney@hotmail.com, was made public in a Wall Street Journal report published this week, which obtained e-mails about behind-the-scene endeavors by Romney and his aides to pass a state healthcare bill when he was governor of Massachusetts. The Associated Press reported earlier this year that the Hotmail account appeared operational as recently as March.
What this incident shows - whether true or not - is that employing security questions that can be guessed easily doesn't provide proper authentication. Too often people provide answers to security questions that can be discovered by Internet searches or, in Romney's case, by following the news.
