Microsoft has recently confirmed that thousands of Windows Live Hotmail customer’s credentials were exposed on a third party website. According to Neowin the account information were posted by an anonymous user at the pastebin website. The list that was posted contained over 10.000 account details of accounts starting with the letters A and B which suggests that additional lists might be in the hands of the attackers. Initial investigations suggest that only accounts used to access Windows Live Hotmail were affected (which includes email accounts ending with hotmail.com, msn.com or live.com.
Microsoft determined that the attack was not a breach of internal Microsoft data and believes that the account data was gained by a phishing attack. Phishing attacks are common ways these days to lure users into entering their account data on websites that look like the real deal but are not.
Hotmail users are encouraged to immediately change their account password to protect the account from unauthorized access. It is furthermore recommended to change the account password on other websites if the same password was used for accounts there as well.
A good tool that can help users create and use secure passwords is the Last Pass extension which is available for Firefox,Internet Explorer and Google Chrome.
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WOW, 10.000 stupid users with a mail starting with “A” or “B”.
Damn, maybe it would be a good idea to start phishing?
I mean, I thought that those scammer was some stupid kid/guy with too much free-time, but if there exist that many stupid people it might be a nice business plan to scam?
No, don’t worry, Im one of the “good guys” :P