Every once in a while I get someone who claims their email has been hacked. It is an infrequent thing, maybe a couple of times per year. Invariably the victim had a really poor choice of passwords, and some agent out there guessed it. For the record, ‘123456’ and ‘password’ are probably the two worst possible passwords to choose. Sooner or later someone WILL be using your account. If that means that they use the account to post scams on PW Classifieds, I tend to lack compassion and understanding.

Anyway, in June 20111 the CIA’s public website was claimed to have been “hacked”. Here is a comic on the difference in perceptions of what “hacked” means to various people.

Point being that someone guessing a poor password is not equivalent to someone hacking a website.

Thanks,
Chris