Security Question

[bigshotprof]

My daughter's gmail account was hacked. Whoever got it used her email address to change the passwords to all of her other stuff--facebook, myspace, flickr etc. (yeah, I know). She is pretty sure it was a prank by a friend and has reclaimed all of her sites. I suggested that she should erase all of her cookies, because people who had access to them might be able to glean info from them. Then I decided I was paranoid. Which me should I believe?

[xcorvis]

Most big sites don't store much relevant info in the cookies. She should get in the habit of logging out and quitting the browser, but even if she were logged in to gmail and someone snuck up and tried to change her PW, it would prompt them for the original password first.

If it was a prank by a friend, they probably just looked over her shoulder when she typed in her not-particularly good password some time. Cookies were probably not involved, but clearly she does need to exercise more caution with her accounts.

[bigshotprof]

Yeah, we had that conversation. Thanks for the help.

[fishtoprecords]

Then I decided I was paranoid. Which me should I believe?
Just because you are paranoid, that doesn't mean that they are not out to get you or your kid.

The reality is that social engineering is the easiest way to hack something. Looking over your kids shoulder, asking what the password is, guessing what it is because you know they love smurfs, etc.

Erasing cookies is a good idea, periodically, but cookies are pretty benign.

This is a problem with the borg, its hard to keep clean

[phil-mize]

look into the application ccleaner... i swear by it... just download it from filehippo.com and tell her to run it everyone once in a while... i run it usually before i go to sleep every night...

[xcorvis]

CCleaner is a great app, I swear by it for system cleaning, but it won't help in this situation. I assume it involved a lab computer at school or another system out of direct control. Simply quitting the browser should clear session cookies, and those should be the only ones with password data. You can't really expect a kid or teen (or even most adults) to do any more than that anyway.