The disclosure of a back door allowing bad guys to repeatedly guess Gmail passwords should remind us all to protect our accounts with long and strong character strings. There's a straightforward way to protect your online accounts — use sign-in phrases that are easy for you to remember but hard for others to guess. The latest vulnerability affecting Gmail accounts was recently revealed by security researcher Vicente Aguilera Díaz in a posting on the Full Disclosure security list. (Aguilera previously revealed a Gmail flaw known as session-riding, which Google subsequently fixed, as reported by WS contributing editor Scott Spanbauer on April 23 and May 7.) According to Aguilera's new security alert, Google allows anyone with a Gmail account to guess another Gmail user's password 100 times every two hours, or 1,200 times per day. No "captcha" keeps hacker bots from guessing passwords in this way. Worst of all: If a hacker controls, say, 100 Gmail accounts, 120,000 guesses can be made per day. Because Gmail accounts are free, many hackers control far more than 100 accounts, of course.

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