my hotmail account got hacked.

[mickthetree]

I dont use my hotmail account these days. Gmail has been great for me for ages.

Got a all from a friend today to say he keeps getting spam emails coming from my hotmail account. Just logged in a sure enough there they are in the sent folder.

I have a very strong password, I never ever open attachments from people I dont know. Any even if I do know them I only ever open them if I'm expecting them. I dont download my mail to any PC, its purely a web based email account.

Had a quick google search and apparently its very common. Microsoft have even published a guide on how to fix it.

As I say I havent even used the account for ages. My pcs are all well protected and virus scanned daily.

I can only assume this is a bigger issue here. Maybe they have harvested email addresses and are running programs to crack the passwords?

Anyway, a heads up for anyone with a hotmail account.

 

[Walter Hall]

Quite a lot about it in the news recently

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

 

[pren]

I had the same thing about a week ago. Loads of spam emails seemingly sent from my account to an alphabetical list of other hotmail accounts :?

For some reason, all of them seem to have been bounced because I had a corresponding number of 'Mailer deamon' reports in my inbox.

I've since changed my password.

 

[Vormulac]

There has been a massive amount of this sort of activity in the last few months, my Hotmail account was hacked and friends have had the same happen to their Yahoo and googlemail accounts too. Just one of those things, I suppose.