What percentage of free email accounts do you think are hacked / phished / compromised each year?
What do you think the odds are of any given email account getting hacked during it's existence?
Which security features, such as 2 or more factor authentication, do you think most help to prevent compromises.
I'm working on some rough statistics but I'm curious to see some educated guesses.
Hi, Ray
Happy New Year !!
I have no educated guess, but I will say that I had no sooner skimmed through several online articles on password safety (length and complexity) than I logged in to EQ and saw this post ! I had been thinking about how most of my email providers allow for passcodes of 20+ characters [Gmail, FastMail, myOpera, Hushmail], while Hotmail/Live only allows 16 characters. Odd, that perhaps the most attacked & hacked email provider out there 1) has the shortest maximum password length I know, 2) does not allow special keyboard characters ($, %, #, @, etc.) for the security question answer, whereas Gmail and others do, and 3) has no two-step authentication (though they do allow cell-phone for password reset). I would think Hotmail would want to
lead in the email security dept., not lag behind !
They do have a "trusted PC" option, which would work for me (since I only access the web on my home desktop), but that's only for IE users, as I understand it.
On second thought, I think I
will take a(n) (un) educated guess:
1. Hacked/compromised/phished each year: 10% ??
2. Hacked during lifetime: 1 out of 100 ??
3. Best prevent compromises: 2-step auth., trusted PC, lock-out after several failed login attempts ??
Anyway, I'm looking forward to seeing what answers
you come up with. They're undoubtedly going to be far more accurate than my far-flung guesses.