Recently on the popular social networking site Twitter.com the owner of the username @N fell victim of a successful social engineering hacking of his account. Long of the short the owner gave up ownership of his widely popular @N user name. For many of you this means nothing but it brings up a good point. Part of the success on part of the hacker was that one service that the owner of @N used was the weak point in what he believed to be good enough security.

The hacker was successfully able to gain access to @N’s registered email account by phone conversation with his domain provider to reset the credentials using only the last 4 digits of the victims credit card number to prove that he was in fact the victim. Had the owner of @N made a note to the company providing his domain, to not allow any account changes over the phone, this hack would have not been successful at all or would have been significantly slowed down. With the important accounts you hold, call the companies holding these accounts, to see if you can have a note added to not allow account changes over the phone. It might prevent you from losing those favorite tweets someday or money.