Yes 100.000’s of hotmail accounts have been compromised. I know its old news but today we where affected by this personally and realized how real it is.

I was reading my email and got an email from my husband. O.o I was like O.o why would he send me an email? I checked the address and yes it was from him. I opened it and read it to find a spam message from some cellphone company. I immediately alerted my husband and he checked his hotmail account right away.

Once logged in he found a lot of returned emails from email addresses that has not been in use anymore. The message that had been send out to those was the same spam i had received.. with links to this site: http://www.mydosell.com. I do not know how save that site is so please be aware of that before you go there. That’s the reason why I did not made a clickable link to it.  That made us realize that someone indeed has been using his email for this spam. Offcourse he changed his pw immediately and I started to Google information on it.

Here’s what I found on the BBC website:

posted on Monday, 5 October 2009 20:02 UK

Thousands of accounts on web-based e-mail system Hotmail have been compromised in a phishing attack, software giant Microsoft has confirmed.

BBC News has seen a list of more than 10,000 e-mail accounts, predominantly originating from Europe, and passwords which were posted online.

To read the whole story click here.

I was not satisfied and wanted to know more and I found this at neowin.net.

An anonymous user posted details of the accounts on October 1 at pastebin.com, a site commonly used by developers to share code snippets. The details have since been removed but Neowin has seen part of the list posted and can confirm the accounts are genuine and most appear to be based in Europe. The list details over 10,000 accounts starting from A through to B, suggesting there could be additional lists. Currently it appears only accounts used to access Microsoft’s Windows Live Hotmail have been posted, this includes @hotmail.com, @msn.com and @live.com accounts.

To read the whole story please go here.

I have read some more stories about this and  some sources said that also g-mail and yahoo and other web-based email sites  have been affected. So my advice for everyone with a web-based email is simple PLEASE change your pw immediately and IF you use that same pw for other accounts  then DO change those too AFTER you have changed your hotmail email pw. To be sure you may want to check on forehand if you are not by any chance affected by a keylogger or a trojan. So your pw does not get compromised again.