What has happened my hotmail account? Help Needed

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Brianne

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I was checking my hotmail account earlier today and I went into the Sent folder to check an email I sent yesterday. I found an email sent from my email address to a relative.There is a link in it and it looks to me like spam. I contacted her and advised not to open it. Now I understand how email addresses can be harvested and spam sent but I don't understand how an email was sent from my password protected account.Nobody else used the computer, it was in the room with me. Could someone please explain this and tell me what I should do? The following is the text of the email and it was sent last night about a hour and half after I had used hotmail. I'm usually very careful about logging out of hotmail. Advise would be very much appreciated.
The following is the text of the email
Hai

Mike just called me to tell he had won 2.500 euro for his holiday. He clicked on a site and answered 3 questions on his mobile and bingo. He got the money yesterday, amazing and cool. I am trying right now. I heard they have a budget of over 15.000 prizes.

Don't tell everybody, here is the link I got

Sighoff?

<Link removed>
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When was this email sent? Did your relative receive it? Are you sure that it was in your Sent Mail folder not Junk Mail? Are there any other suspicious emails in your Sent Mail folder? Have you changed your password to a high security one (e.g. good mix of alphanumeric and symbolic characters)?
 
Thanks for reply ,Clubman. I sent four emails yesterday to the same friend, the last one at 19.16. This email states it was sent at 21.56. My relative is not at the computer today, I texted her to tell her not to open it. Tonight I'll ask her to check that it went into her account but it is definitely in my Sent Mail folder as sent to her. There are no other suspicious emails, I already have a mix of letters and nos for my password. I am going to change it now.I am suspicious about email anyway but will be even more so now.
 
How do you access Hotmail - webmail/brower, Outlook Express, Windows Live Mail, other? If you use a non webmail client interface then there is always a possibility that your computer is infected with a virus/malware which may be sending emails surreptitiously. It might even be possible even if you just use webmail - I'm not sure. Are you confident that your own PC is secure and kept clean?
 
Lauren, thanks for that link. The browser I use is Mozilla Firefox, I click it and the Google page comes up. I then type in hotmail and that directs me to the MSN page where I click mail. I am probably doing this all wrong , I don't know. On the advise of my son, I rarely use Internet Explorer, I stay with Mozilla. As it happened I ran Ad-Aware this am before this and it showed up no viruses. However I think the Mc Afee Security is out of date, so I will deal with that . I hope the don't send this to everyone in the address book.
 
rmelly said:
Use of the term 'very common' is misleading.
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exactly ... I have had a hotmail account since 1996 without changing the password and haven't had an issue...


Unless you have a virus or give out your password no one can "hijack" a hotmail account...
 
Hi Brianne, unfortunately I have no advice on the hotmail matter, but in terms of your McAfee being out of date, you could get the free AVG anti-virus, just google it.
 
jhegarty said:
exactly ... I have had a hotmail account since 1996 without changing the password and haven't had an issue...


Unless you have a virus or give out your password no one can "hijack" a hotmail account...
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I did not have a virus nor did I give my password out to anyone and my account was hijacked and used to send email to all my contacts by a spammer so I disagree with your statement above. Google the term Hotmail Account Hijack to see how common it might be. I received a reply from Microsoft customer support to say this problem can occur when the password is low or medium complexity and researching the internet reveals that it is more common than I would have thought (or liked).
 
Google the term Hotmail Account Hijack to see how common it might be
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Means nothing:

I googled the term 'Hotmail Account Hijack' (without quotes) and it found 31700 results (with quotes returned 4 or 10 with duplicates). 4 is hardly 'common' consider the billions of pages out there on the interweb.

I googled the term 'Google Account Hijack' (without quotes) and it found 1,330,000 results.

this problem can occur when the password is low or medium complexity
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This problem can occur in pretty much ANY system unless it locks accounts when users enter invalid password x number of times (or similar) - the issue is not hotmail related - it is your poor password complexity.

I just tried over 20 invalid passwords in my gmail account without being locked out, so it's no less vulnerable.

Equally, I was just allowed create a gmail account with the password: passw0rd

This is NOT secure - it's probably the second password that hijackers check...
 
The issue is related to spammers who exploit webmail accounts, by attacking vulnerabilities, in my case password complexity. The OP mentioned Hotmail and I've shared my experience and opinion...
 
yes, but you have also made incorrect statements on how common the issue is with hotmail which I don't believe should be let stand.
 
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