heads up for people using gmail (or other webbased email) for their gambling accounts

[LVHerbie]

I'm cross posting this here from another forum I posted this at because I figured somebody over here probably is in the same situation....

<< I was traveling this weekend and keep all my passwords on a memory stick using keepass which I quickly realized I had forgotten at home... So I was wanting to play some online poker and decided to see if I could get into my accounts through the password recovery on gmail and was surprised to see that all it took was my father's middle name (I guess I choose this security question years back when I set up the account)

After answer this security question I was back playing poker in like 5 minutes... I was also able to find the information about my weak security question in about five minutes using one of the free public people search tools online which had my father's full name (including middle name) listed as a relative next a search of my name in less then two minutes...Clearly, for someone who took the time to set up 20+ character randomly generated passwords for all their accounts, I was pretty pissed to see how weak gmail's security verification process for password recovery was... My security question is now another randomly generated password but I thought I would pass this along as I'm sure I'm not the only one with thousands of dollars sitting behind weak security that could be broken by someone who knew my email address, my name (which is displayed everytime I send an email) and could do basic searches on the internet...>>

[onthewhat]

That is true, so what you are supposed to do is put the question fathers middle name, but for answer just put a random string of characters, not the actual middle name.

[The General]

The information highway is getting more worrisome every day. So much personal information can be found out these days with technological advances. That is not terribly bad, except for those people who hear/read a snippet of a scenario and then run with it like it is the absolute fact. Thanks for sharing this info with the posters, LVH.

Have a good one.

[Boner_18]

I like to choose the security questions with subjective answers:
What is your favorite color?
Where would you like to take a vacation?

Or ones the public cannot search for:
What was your first car?
What is the name of your first girlfriend/boyfriend?

[Chi_archie]

uh oh

[LVHerbie]

That is true, so what you are supposed to do is put the question fathers middle name, but for answer just put a random string of characters, not the actual middle name.

I just used the option to enter your own question but it pretty much wouldn't matter what the question says as long as you know how to generate the password...