Network Lighthouse

— From the article

The college student accused of hacking into Sarah Palin’s e-mail account in 2008 has been found guilty of obstruction of justice and unauthorized access of a computer. The verdict against 22-year-old David Kernell came down late Friday, with sentencing to follow later.

— via Palin e-mail hacker found guilty.

I have mixed feelings about this outcome, while the individual undoubtadly did the wrong thing be breaking into someones email account, he also highlighted the risks we all face(particularly public figures) as a result of the (secret) question/answer system for reseting forgotten passwords.

I don’t think these issues could have been highlighted in any more clear way to raise the publics awareness of this.  No matter how many times the security iductry warns against the weaknesses of the present system, it takes real incidents (like the above) before the issues are generally accepted.

-Daniel