This morning a contact whose email (xxx@live.co.uk) had been hacked got in before me with an apology, which I appreciate
Think my mailbox has been hacked
If you receive an email from me with a weblink saying 'look at these photos' or something like that, do not open.
Delete straight away or mark as phishing scam.
Sorry.
Yesterday I replied to another
Hi xxx:
Hotmail seems vulnerable to hacking by spammers. I've never noticed problems with gmail ...
Tim
Is this the best advice for friends in this situation?
Hotmail does seems to get hacked a lot. It's happened to a few people I know and me.
One issue is when people link their hotmail with Facebook to 'find friends'. As soon as I did that I got hacked, and it happened to two other friends, one of which had serious financial concequences which resulted in a missed holiday.
Don't link your Facebook account with your email to find friends!
99.9999% of Hotmail email addresses are not hacked its vunerable people disclosing their email address and password on websites that trick you.
You will get an email with a header that might attract your attention
e.g.
'Is this your neighbour thats been caught - click HERE'
'See who has blocked you on instant messenger - click HERE'
'See what people are saying about you on the net - click HERE'
'Watch this video of you - click HERE'
'You have won a prize - click HERE'
You click on a link, it pretends to be hotmail and asks for your hotmail account and password.
Hey presto these so called hackers (who are actually spammers) now have your details of your account (email and password).
They then sign in to your account (msn messenger) and spam all your contacts with the same email or advertising something ..............thats how they hack the vasy majority of Hotmail accounts .........in fact they are not actually hacking them, YOU gave them your details.
Okepinay wrote:99.9999% of Hotmail email addresses are not hacked its vunerable people disclosing their email address and password on websites that trick you.
I think my own sample of contacts whose hotmail accounts have been hacked is quite good enough to say that a significant number of hotmail accounts are hacked - and I have never noticed such hacking coming from gmail accounts. It must be either than Google requires a higher standard of password on its users, or that its systems are better at picking up this sort of spam.
It does appear as if hotmail is disproportionately affected. If it is because an initial tranche of hotmail users have been duped into giving their details, what does this mean? Do the initial spammers target hotmail? Is it because it is easier for them to target hotmail? Is it because there are proportionally so many hotmail users that statistically it is more likely to happen to a hotmail user? Are hotmail users inherently more gullible?
Its a yes to all the above. Plus Hotmail had historically some glaring holes in its security and its owned by Microsoft (the enemy of choice for any self respecting blackhat).
Google 'Hacking Hotmail' for a flavour. Slightly more than 99.999999% of spam coming from hacked friend's email accounts are Hotmail. That says it all about Hotmail (or my friends!).
And another comes in this morning - from a well respected local councillor with an AOL account. Yes, they do exist, and hopefully they are aware of the public benefit Forums such as this bring on matter such as this - and much else
And he/she just emailed to say he/she had never given his/her password to anyone - but he/she is still going to change it. I don't quite follow the logic of this - I think it would make more sense to switch to another web mail service
A new variant - this time from someone whose btinternet.com account has evidently been hacked, although the scam email comes from a yahoo account with a name constructed to look genuine - i.e. including the victim's name and some numbers. For what it's worth, the scam email went:
Did you get my email? I had a trip to Spain yesterday for a brief program, I am presently in Madrid and I don't have any phone with me. Please let me know if you can help me, I don't have any money with me. I will be waiting for your reply.
I'm not sure what the best advice is here - is it a malicious file being downloaded, or is a link to a website which launches a bot to read your on-line addresses. I guess the latter is more likely. How do you recognise such sites? Are some webmail services known to be more vulnerable than others?
