If Sarah Palin had Used Opolis Secure Mail …

April 29, 2010 - PRLog -- On 17 September 2008 the Washington Post reported of hackers claiming to have accessed the Yahoo Email account of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (gov.palin@yahoo.com). Reportedly this – what was assumed to be a - group of hackers published some of her private communications to expose what appeared to be her use of a personal account for government business. At that moment Ms Palin was the Republican vice presidential nominee and in the midst of her election campaign together with Sen. John McCain.

The recent Spiegel article reporting on the trial of – what is now known to be – a single hacker, David Kernell, sheds a light on how he got access to Ms Palin´s account. As a matter of fact, the password for the Yahoo Email account could be changed or reset: What was then foremost required was submitting the date of birth and address of the owner of the Yahoo Email account and the answer of a “security” question as a cross-check. Mr Kernell researched all required information, including the answer to the question “Where did you get to know your spouse?” simply via Google within a period of 45 minutes. – And that was it.

This raises the general issue of password reset and to what extent Email service provider should be able to “assist” in this process. – For example, if you had lost of forgotten your password with Opolis Secure Mail (http://www.opolis.eu), it cannot be recovered again. Only the user would know the combination and nobody else. The user chooses a personal login name and a password and submits both each time logging into Opolis via the Opolis Mail Client. Both, user name and (an extended and repeatedly hashed) password are encrypted. That also ensures that the actually typed in password is never transmitted over the public Internet or to Opolis in its function as a service provider and that it is never stored on or never leaves any local PC.

And, what Ms Palin would probably – now - like as well is that all Opolis Emails are point-to-point encrypted. So, even in the unlikely case that an Opolis Email was intercepted, it could not be interpreted or read. Further, with Opolis the sender has always full authority over what the recipient is allowed to do with a message and is empowered to monitor and follow the entire path of a message. For example, the sender decides whether the recipient may copy, print, respond to or forward a message or not.

Opolis is for free and running in both, the Windows and Apple worlds, and currently available in English, German, Czech and Russian language versions.

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http://www.opolis.eu
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