Anonymous Hacks Into Syrian President’s Email — Password Was 12345

By David Ponce

Syria’s uprising could take on a new twist in the coming days as news that hacker group Anonymous has gained access to Syrian president Bashar Al-Assad’s personal email account surfaces. Unfortunately for the leet pride of most of Anonymous’ hackers, they didn’t have to do much work to gain entry as Al-Assad’s password was simply “12345”. Once in, the group had access to 78 different inboxes belonging to either the president or his staffers. We have no doubt that these emails are being read as we type this and once the good bits start to surface, it’ll be interesting to see who gets embarrassed. We just need to look back a few months at the fallout from the WikiLeaks cables to see how damaging this type of information can be to governments worldwide.

We should soon find out more. In the meantime, if your password is something as stupid as “12345” or even “password”, do yourself a favor and just go change it. It doesn’t even need to be anything too elaborate; a short string of hard-to-remember unrelated random characters is less secure than a longer string of say, a few related words. Like “idontlikerememberingpasswords”.

VIA [ Geek.com ]