Email passwords of a million users hacked
Microsoft stated on Monday that Hotmail was the target of an extensive scam that led users into giving away their passwords to unauthorized users, who posted approximately 10,000 passwords online.
The company said that the security breach was not due to any fault from their servers, but instead due to the extensive work of con artists, who convinced the individual email owners to reveal their personal details.
However, the larger piece of news is that the password scam is now thought to have not only affected thousands of Hotmail users, but also users who use email accounts at Comcast, Yahoo, Google, Earthlink, and a few other third party email services.
According to Neil O?Neil of the Logic Group it is possible that up to a million email passwords may have been given away and accessed from the scam.
He went on to state that since the breach was made public so quickly after the initial discovery of the attack, hackers were given the heads up about the presence of the passwords, leading to many hackers to gain full access to the lists, before Microsoft requested the lists be deleted.
O?Neil went on to state that the implications of this are more than most people may initially think, since most people tend to use the same passwords for all of their accounts, which potentially could have placed paypal and ebay accounts at risk as well.
To combat this problem internet users are often advised to change their passwords on a regular basis, and keep their anti-virus software up to date.
A spokesman from Microsoft stated that the company is aware of the fact that some Hotmail users? passwords were illegally placed on a website by a phishing scheme, but that they had launched an investigation, and requested the websites that hosted the details to take them down.
