Phishing attacks that affected customers of Microsoft’s Hotmail Monday have compromised more than 30,000 email accounts, including those of Gmail, Yahoo Mail and other services.
Microsoft blamed phishing, in which cybercriminals try to trick consumers into revealing personal information through fraudulent emails, for a list of Hotmail account passwords that appeared online.
Microsoft says a phishing scheme is behind the exposure of passwords to thousands of Hotmail accounts late last week and adds that it’s helping affected customers regain control of their accounts.
On Monday, the Neowin technology blog posted a story saying that an anonymous user on Oct. 1 had uploaded a list with password details of more than 10,000 Hotmail accounts to a Web site called pastebin.com, where developers typically share programming code with each other.
Yesterday, while China Web watchers were digesting the latest bit of news on the requirement that PCs sold in China include government-mandated Internet filtering software, the Web as we knew it a week ago quietly returned.
It’s the end of instant messaging as we know it. Those chat boxes once commonplace on a computer desktop amid documents, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are giving way to a new breed of user-friendly, real-time conversation tools that Internet companies hope will keep users engaged with their content–and the advertising that appears alongside it.
2008 hasn’t been the best year for CAPTCHA-based anti-spam systems; Google’s Gmail CAPTCHA was broken in February, followed by that of Hotmail in April. Researchers have fought back by incorporating images into CAPTCHAs, but this is only effective against bot-driven CAPTCHA crackers.
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