Yikes! What's happening at Hotmail?

[Dan B]

I knew someone who unknowingly had some quite unsavoury character leech off his unprotected wifi, and several months later was woken at dawn by members of the constabulary when his IP address came up in a scan. Having your hotmail hacked is really not the worst that can happen to you: go and set up WPA now.

 

[Manonabike]

Oh - one of the most obvious ways to give away your secrets is to use insecure WIFI!

Make sure that your home WIFI is secure.

If you are going to use public WIFI, be aware that that bloke sitting opposite you could be monitoring everything that you do - read this! If you didn't have to set up a password to gain access to the WIFI network then it is insecure unless the site you are using is accessed via SSL (address begins with HTTPS not HTTP) or you use a Virtual Private Network (VPN).

Hotmail is insecure on insecure public WIFI!

Collin, that article is from 2009 but I didn't think it is a very good article, nothing wrong with the main concepts, personal taste I guess.

Basically, nothing is 100% secure ( a bit like bike's locks ) there are many levels of security and yet one still reads about some kid hacking into the Pentagon's super duper computer from the comfort of his own bedroom. A lot of the times these hackers all they want to do is test their skills against the best people in the business.

I sometimes wonder, when I read articles like the article in question, if there really exist people that sit in coffee shops to wait for unsuspected internet users to steal their secrets

I always tell my friends don't buy anything or do internet banking over the internet at public places full stop.

To crack WEP encryption needs special software and knowledge - to crack a WPA2 (latest encryption) is requires even more sophisticated software and even far more knowledge.

To spy on an open wife connection still needs special software and knowledge, so it's not like one can sit there open a laptop and see what other people are doing on the internet. Having said that, it's much easier than having to crack a WEP, WPA or WPA2 before one can snoop.

By the way, Gmail does now offer full https and IMHO Internet Explore is still not to be trusted with security.

The thing with Hotmail..... spammers have been targeting Hotmail accounts owner to send their spam to the account holder contacts. This can be a real nightmare. A friend of mind had to abandon his account after he got fed up of this problem. After he changed the password he found that everytime he wanted to check his emails the account had been locked by hotmail. Basically, the spammers had his original password and they would try to log in too many times with the old password, resulting in the account being locked. Everything is automated so it's not like they are typing the password . On the other hand, other friends, including my daughter, all they needed to do was to change the password.

 

[ColinJ]

Collin, that article is from 2009 but I didn't think it is a very good article, nothing wrong with the main concepts, personal taste I guess.

I didn't make much of an effort to find the best article I could, I just linked to the first one I found. I was trying to give people a fright so they might take the subject more seriously.

I sometimes wonder, when I read articles like the article in question, if there really exist people that sit in coffee shops to wait for unsuspected internet users to steal their secrets

If I were into cybercrime, that's exactly what I would be doing since people are so unaware of it!

I always tell my friends don't buy anything or do internet banking over the internet at public places full stop.

The thing is - 99% of the public probably don't know the risks of that.

To crack WEP encryption needs special software and knowledge - to crack a WPA2 (latest encryption) is requires even more sophisticated software and even far more knowledge.

I don't think those are the real worries, it's the unencrypted traffic which is the problem and AFAIK that describes most public WIFI.

To spy on an open wife connection still needs special software and knowledge, so it's not like one can sit there open a laptop and see what other people are doing on the internet.

I've seen it done on TV news reports and that's exactly what the hacker did. He used a piece of software that is easily found on the internet. It took me less than 1 minute to find it! (I won't say what it was ... )

By the way, Gmail does now offer full https.

Most people don't use that though.

Internet Explore is still not to be trusted with security.

I would never choose to use it, but keep a bookmark to it for those sites that have been so badly bodged to be IE-friendly that they don't work properly on anything else! The problem is - a lot of people do still use it.

The thing with Hotmail..... spammers have been targeting Hotmail accounts owner to send their spam to the account holder contacts. This can be a real nightmare. A friend of mind had to abandon his account after he got fed up of this problem. After he changed the password he found that everytime he wanted to check his emails the account had been locked by hotmail. Basically, the spammers had his original password and they would try to log in too many times with the old password, resulting in the account being locked. Everything is automated so it's not like they are typing the password . On the other hand, other friends, including my daughter, all they needed to do was to change the password.

I'm using my own email accounts more and more, but the trouble is the hundreds of contacts who legitimately know my hotmail addresses. I'd never be able to contact all of them to ask them to change over. There must be many people like me!

I only discovered the Hotmail filters a few days ago! (Inbox/Sweep/Manage Rules) I was getting 5 or 6 spam emails a day from the same company which Hotmail was correctly rating as Junk, but I still had to manually delete them. Now, I never even know they existed - bliss!

 

[PaulSB]

Out of interest, other than being free, why do people use Hotmail? I binned it perhaps 14-15 years ago. Massive security issues surround it, big junk mail problem plus it's associated with MSN which is a serious source of virus infection.

I've never met an IT professional with a good word to say about it.

 

[Dan B]

Perhaps nothing is 100% secure but there's still a big difference between 95% and 0%. Google for "firesheep", it's hardly obscure

Some people have tools to break bike locks, doesn't mean you wouldn't still use one

 

[NormanD]

This is what I got when I tried to sign into mine last week.
Your account has been blocked
Why are you seeing this?
Someone may have used your account to send out a lot of junk messages (or something else that violates the Windows Live Terms of Service).
We're here to help you get your account back.
What do you need to do?
We'll ask you to provide us with a mobile phone number where we can send you a verification code and we'll add this phone number to your Windows Live profile for future use. After you enter the code, you can change your password and sign in.
We've cleaned your account settings
Often customers get here because someone else has access to your account and is using it without your knowledge to send spam. To protect you and your contacts, we've removed any Hotmail auto-replies or linked accounts you may have had.

I use that account for web pages that require an email address, looks like that ones screwed