Earlier this week, you may have read about Justice Secretary Jack Straw of the U.K. having to inform parliament that his Hotmail account had been compromised and his name was being used as part of a Nigerian scam to extort money. The fraudsters came up with a very stupid story pretending to be Mr. Straw who lost his wallet on a trip thus forcing him to ask people for money. Government ministers do not carry things such as wallets or typical I.D. on a trip - that is handled by staff. The only thing they carry is government I.D. This shows why it is not a good idea to use a politician as part of an extortion plot in an email.
On a related note, government ministers should not use Hotmail. It is one of the lowest security web mail services unless you use the enhanced security settings for a more secure access. However, in a lot of cases the advanced security settings don't work the way they are supposed to thus making it easier to break into a target account. If he wanted increased security while using Hotmail, he should have upgraded to the paid edition of the service which has additional security precautions. He would have been wise to use Google mail as even the free edition has a fully encrypted mode and is designed to be a higher security application than Hotmail. If he needed even more security, he could have signed up for a Google Apps account for $50.00 per year. This is a business email with a separate network of servers for even higher security. It has full support for HTTPS access as well as VPN support which allows for default permanent encrypted access to the account. It is also independently certified for high security use and is rated for government use. From a security practices point of view, there are conflicting reports about whether the Justice Minister used his Hotmail account for U.K. government business as well as family. That is specifically against government systems policy except in cases in which you have secure email as mentioned above. I certainly hope no classified government data or legal proceedings were included in his emails. The one piece of good news is that as soon as this situation became public, Microsoft suspended the account, in world record time for Microsoft. In the end, note to all politicians and government employees, DON'T EVER USE HOTMAIL FOR GOVERNMENT BUSINESS. Hopefully I haven't bored everyone reading this. Have a good day.
