emails ending hotmail.com, msn.com and live.com - Warning

Post by **emanday** » Mon Oct 05, 2009 8:39 pm

Microsoft has just announced that these have been compromised...

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8291268.stm

Please read the advice about changing passwords.

Post by **joette** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:16 pm

Thanks for that Mary -mine is .co.uk should I change anyway do you think?

Post by **Tracey** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 8:37 pm

They had an article in the freebie London paper Metro and they said that information for about 10,000 email addresses had been published but these were soon removed from the web but advised never the less to change your password.

LesleyB · Post by **LesleyB** » Tue Oct 06, 2009 9:43 pm

There have been a lot of phishing emails arriving in my Hotmail account of late. I suspect that the details that have been published may well be information that has been gathered by people falling for the phishing scam - it was the usual type of "in order to retain your Hotmail account we need you to fill in the following details - username, password" etc

Post by **emanday** » Wed Oct 07, 2009 2:07 am

I think the most unnerving thing that should be noticed about all this is the likelyhood that many of us use the same password for many different online "connections".

Personally, I use a password manager that I can ask to generate random passwords for any new sites I might register with. However, I have to admit that I have used the same password many times in the past and never changed it.

Guess who has just gone through them all and changed that?

Phishing has got a lot more intelligent (for that read devious) of late. The obvious ones asking you to login from an email to "confirm" your bank, eBay, etc... accounts are recognised by regular net users as scams, but they are getting even more devious, apparently.

My advice - if you have email accounts with the .??? addresses that have been identified as compromised, login to your accounts that are concerned with buying, banking, selling or other identity sensitive areas (Ancestry, Genes Renunited, etc...) and change your passwords to something totally different to any others.

Come to think of it - Even if you don't have any of those email accounts, change all your passwords to unique ones for each online account. I know it is a pain, but think of the problems it could avoid in the future.