Is your Yahoo (etc) account safe?

Someone asked me the questions yesterday: (a) is it possible to obtain someone's Yahoo (or Hotmail, etc) password -- and thus read their mail -- and (b) how do you do it?

The answers: (a), yes, 12-year-olds at my son's school can do it, and then impersonate others on Messenger; and (b) I don't know -- I said -- but go to Google-is-Evil and you can be sure you can find out.

The key to successful search is often knowing the operative keywords. If you want to know the answer to (b), your operative keywords are "hack" and/or "crack"... I got over 2 million results, and I'll leave it at that.

Fortunately, apart from the Evil, there's lots of good stuff on the Web. If you have a Yahoo account, Yahoo have a good security section, and specific suggestions on how to create a safe password.

A safe password is long, contains numbers and symbols and is not your birthday, among other things...

If you're using Hotmail (or whatever), check their recommendations out too.

If you're using MySpace, just don't...!

More on online security...