No justice for Jack Straw

jackstrawJack Straw must be having a bad day. The media outlets have been alive all day reporting on his online misfortune. I was really taken with the way in which Charles Arthur reported this in The Guardian.  What has happened here is that someone has managed to gain access to Jack Straw’s personal email account on Gmail. The finger of suspicion falls onto a group of Nigerian 419 scammers, as the emails they sent out are of the ‘Help, I am stuck in a tricky predicament, please send cash’, which is a current favourite of theirs.

As to whether we ever get to the bottom of how this came to happen, we will have to wait and see. Either the gang managed to ‘brute-force’(trial and error method used by application programs to decode encrypted data such as passwords) and discover his login/password, or he just used really easy to guess credentials. Or, he fell for a keylogger, that recorded his credentials and forwarded it onto the miscreants for them to use at their will.  Whatever sense of ‘injustice’ that Jack is feeling, he  should be kicking himself that, for the sake of some using some strong passwords and ensuring that his PC had an up to date internet security application, he could have avoided such a public humiliation.

February 25, 2009 | Filed Under Security 

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