Posted by Sonicity Blog on October 5th, 2009
All Hotmail users are now advised to change their password used on the Hotmail site – And if the same password is used for various other sites, then change them all too. This is due to a big information theft operation – Where over 10,000 Hotmail login details were publicly posted on the internet. Although the details have been taken offline now, backup copies of the information have already been taken – Which means your login details could be saved by criminals.
The list of 10,000 is said to be a small portion of a huge list – With the 10,000 login details only having usernames beginning with A and B. This means that although your details may not have yet been published online, they could still be saved elsewhere as part of a bigger list. For this reason, it’s important that you change your password just incase you are part of this huge list, because you could experience some major issues if other people have access to your e-mail account.
Microsoft have been informed on the publishing of this list, and are apparently “investigating” the leak of the information. It is still unknown how these details were actually found. It could be because of various methods – Such as hacking certain services, or installing a virus onto the computer’s of innocent victims. We expect Microsoft to notify the public with more information as they’ve discovered it.
For now, however, there really isn’t much we can do. The only thing we can do is to change our passwords, make sure our computer’s are clean of viruses and make sure everyone else knows about this problem – The more people who know about this information theft, the better.