Hotmail Security, How to Report a Hacked Account ~ Security Garden

Dealing with hijacked Hotmail accounts has long been a top priority for the Hotmail team. The Hotmail Safety and Security blog recently reported about an increase in hijacked accounts and spam emails sent to a account owner's contact list without their knowledge.

Some of the symptoms reported to the Hotmail team by people whose account was hijacked include:

Deleted contacts
Deleted emails
Safe sender's list is deleted
Junk Mail Settings is set to Exclusive, which prevents mail from being delivered to the Inbox.

Unfortunately, the account owner is not always the first person to discover that their account has been hacked. Instead, it is the recipients of the spam or phishing emails that arrived in their inbox from their friend's hacked account.

How to Report a Hacked E-Mail Account

Now, in addition to contacting your friend about the problem with their account, the Hotmail team is incorporating a way to report a compromised account.

From the "Mark as" menu option, click the My friend’s been hacked!” option:

You can also report an account you believe is compromised while marking as Junk or moving it to the Junk folder:

What Happens After The Account is Reported

When Hotmail receives the report, the information is added to the other information from their compromise detection engine to determine if the account has been compromised.

If the reported account is a Yahoo! or Gmail account, arrangements have been made with those providers for the information to be forwarded to them to use in their respective systems to recover hacked accounts.

For Hotmail accounts identified as compromised, the following will occur:

The spammer can no longer use the account
When the account owner attempts to access their account, they will be referred to the account recovery process.

Additional Topics on Managing Hotmail

References

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4 comments:

AnonymousJuly 14, 2011 at 7:57 PM
I wonder if practical jokers will be making use of this to get the accounts of people (whom they don't know) all tied up in red tape by making false reports. The blog post said that, although this report wouldn't be the *only* thing they consider, that it might be the most important. :-\
BuffetJuly 15, 2011 at 3:03 AM
NOBODY tells me what passwords to use!!
CorrineJuly 15, 2011 at 9:49 AM
The same thing crossed my mind too, "Anonymous". However, it is one thing for the "compromise detection system" to pick up a high level of activity from an account but add to that report(s) from recipients would add a strong trigger.

There is also an undisclosed limit of the number of e-mail messages that can be sent per day. An account with low activity would result in a false report being disregarded. See Your message wasn’t sent because there’s a daily message limit.

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Buffet, it isn't a matter of telling anyone what passwords to use, rather that the password is too weak and, thus, easily detected.

Compromised accounts are a major source of spam. Most times, the accounts are compromised because the bot programmed with a password-detecting program was able to easily gain access to the account because the password was weak.
UnknownDecember 4, 2012 at 2:46 PM
Hey,

Thanks for sharing best information about "How to Report a Hacked Account" really help blog . i like it. thanks again..

Regards
Hotmail Support

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Thursday, July 14, 2011