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Weak Password recovery mechanism


Sarah Palin's Yahoo mail account was hacked during 2008 presidential election, reason? Phishing,MITM, XSS or Virus/Trojan? No, the correct answer is: using her publicly available information,somebody was able retrieve her password determining the answers for Password reset mechanism.
These things are very abundant in today's websites. Some websites use damn weak password recovery mechanism. Even Password reset question is dead easy to guess like: the city where you born into,what is your pet's name, what's your father's middle name or which is your favorite film.
The last one is damn easy to guess,reason being, you often chat to your friends about your favorite film or list favorite films.
I was surprised to see that Indiatimes web mail is very lenient in employing mechanisms for recovering the forgot password. I am valid user of Indiatimes web mail. After a very long time I unsuccessfully tried to login into my account. Because I had forgot my password, I tried to recover my password after clicking on the "Forgot Password?" link.
The first step was to ask my indiatimes user id. Providing that in the second step will be at "Security Question and Answer" page. I had set my security question as " My favorite film" and answer was quite obvious. Everybody a bit close to me can simply guess that in 1-2 attempts.
I admit that I am responsible for setting such a lenient security question.
But next thing was shocking. When I provided my favorite film's name it straightaway showed my password 'in front of me'. I was shocked to see this. Very generous!
Had anybody before me tried this thing he would have simply got my password!
Even I had already provided my alternate e-mail address but instead of sending the password it showed upfront.
Simply I gain access to somebody's weak security question's answer and that too in just one step!

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