Microsoft investigates Hotmail 'security breach of 10,000 accounts'

[AdrianH]

<a href="http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/technology/article6861965.ece" target="_blank">http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle6861965.ece</a>

More great stuff from Redmond......... and this week they launched MSE another totally useless "security" product for Windows.

[Dismounted]

MSE is surprisingly decent thank-you-very-much!

[AdrianH]

Originally Posted by Dismounted

MSE is surprisingly decent thank-you-very-much!

Really?

I downloaded the Vista 64bit version and XP 32bit,my neighbour tried the 32bit XP.

Install and 1st thing you have to do is update......................... 3.5 hours on an 8 meg connection for me and next door on a LLU 24meg was 2+ hours.

Tested against some virus test utilities it failed utterly to prevent intrusion and data collection and nothing was found on a scan.

3 days later the screen is still showing Green/Ok and states it is up to date......... 3 days zero updates? Click update and low and behold we get an update version which shows there have been 3 previous new file sets.

First run on 2 test machines Windows pops up a warning that it has blocked a start up program ......... yes MSE. Tell it to allow and on each restart the same thing happened.

Where is the protection for email/messaging? The free AV utilities have been giving that for years.

Sorry but there is no way I am going to trust my machines to MSE. I thought having read some glowing reviews that we had something really great to use............

[Dean C]

It was a phishing attack. Not much MS can do about it. Gmail was affected too and has issued a press release about it. The problem is your average user doesn't understand phishing. I know my mother is the prime candidate for phishing and I keep having to tell her to not open emails unless she is expecting one.

[BSMedia]

Originally Posted by CareyCrew

http://business.timesonline.co.uk/to...cle6861965.ece


More great stuff from Redmond......... and this week they launched MSE another totally useless "security" product for Windows.

More great one sided slanted posts!

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle6863123.ece

gMail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail were all effected

Google said: "We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts. As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts. We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them.

[Wayne Luke]

Originally Posted by Dean C

It was a phishing attack. Not much MS can do about it. Gmail was affected too and has issued a press release about it. The problem is your average user doesn't understand phishing. I know my mother is the prime candidate for phishing and I keep having to tell her to not open emails unless she is expecting one.

Her email client doesn't have phishing protection? Mine does. People need to remain up to date on their software so there is less chance of them being taken advantage of.

[AdrianH]

Originally Posted by BSMedia

More great one sided slanted posts!

http://technology.timesonline.co.uk/...cle6863123.ece

gMail, Yahoo, AOL and Hotmail were all effected

One sided/slanted?

You are that ignorant and poorly read that you have never seen a news story develop over a period of days?

At the time of the original post that was the ONLY information available,perhaps you should look more closely before you make one sided and slanted comments.

[agitated]

At the end of the day it's a phishing attack that was successful in the case of those who's details were revealed.

It's not the EMail clients fault. It's the lack of security at the consumer end that is the problem. How many fake emails do you see in your mail box, either as junk or whatever and how many do you actually respond to by clicking a link in the email. None, I'll bet.

EMails with a link do not get flagged as a virus. They only get flagged as possible junk or a possible security risk. If you don't have any security measures in place they might not get flagged at all.

It's was the end user clicking a link, and then confirming their password that led to this whole issue in the first place.

[Dean C]

Originally Posted by Wayne Luke

Her email client doesn't have phishing protection? Mine does. People need to remain up to date on their software so there is less chance of them being taken advantage of.

It's hard enough getting her to understand how to use an internet browser as it is. Therefore I set her up on gmail Operating two programs is a bit too much for her at the moment

[DeanLag]

I have a board that everyone who posted their MSN on it got affected.
Although some were the results of phishing, I believe theres more to it.
My users are very computer friendly and well educated so I highly doubt their information could be phished. Some testimonials said that their passwords were really strong - including numbers and random letters.
I've personally emailed microsoft about it but didn't get back to me.

The hackings were aimed to get gaming accounts. I had to do some detective work and finally got the guy - banned him. However, he visited the site via a proxy and it took some time for me to get him. He was, I assume, looking for MSN email accounts via the memberlist, which I disabled. I also removed all MSN emails manually so people don't get hacked.

This was about 1 month ago.