The services advertise openly and there doesn't appear to be much anyone can do about it because while federal law prohibits hacking into e-mail, without further illegal activity, it's only a misdemeanor, says Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University. "The feds usually don't have the resources to investigate and prosecute misdemeanors," says Kerr. "And part of the reason is that normally it's hard to know when an account has been compromised, because e-mail snooping doesn't leave a trace." It's not clear where YourHackerz.com is located, but experts suspect that most password hacking businesses are based overseas.
Experts said there are numerous ways to steal someone's e-mail password, from simply guessing at family names or pet names to high-tech infiltration that let's web-based e-mail, such as Google's gmail and Yahoo, be attacked through bugs in the Web browser. "The unfortunate news is there's rather less of computer security than we would want," says one computer expert adding that "if you're an ordinary person and afraid you have an ex-lover who wants to hack you, you're probably better off not using computers for the kinds of communications you want to keep secret."
Photo: untitled by Kamel Cabrera Flickr Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 2.0 Generic
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