US presidential candidate Mitt Romney will likely be reconsidering his email passwords after his online email account was reportedly hacked.

A hacker claims to have accessed Romney’s Hotmail and Dropbox accounts after guessing the answer to the Republican candidate’s ‘favourite pet’ security question. It’s suspected Romney used the same password for more than one account.

While Romney’s camp has refused to confirm or deny the hack, it is likely to be worrying for the Republican party. Their 2008 vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin had her Yahoo email account hacked and some of the contents were published online.

Romney’s personal email address was published by The Associated Press earlier this year. Some of his private emails had been accessed under Massachusetts law because he had used his Hotmail account to conduct government business while serving as the state’s governor.

There are concerns in political circles about the risks involved with using online email accounts for government business as they are usually more easily hacked than accounts hosted on company and government servers. Government watchdogs say the practice also raises transparency concerns, as emails sent through private accounts aren’t archived with the emails sent from government accounts.

Probably the most noteworthy example was when the Bush administration was unable to produce all internal White House emails during investigations into the sacking of eight US attorneys in 2007. The White House was forced to admit that some government emails were sent via non-governmental email accounts and more than five million messages may have been either lost or deleted.

Do you use an online email account for business purposes? Do you think this is risky or does it work well for you? I would like to hear your thoughts in the comments section below.