Hotmail Hit by Phishing Attacks
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Thousands of hotmail email accounts were the target of a possible phishing attack according to Microsoft. Login details of users were put up on a website and their security compromised.
Over the weekend, Microsoft learned that several thousand Windows Live Hotmail customers’ credentials were exposed on a third-party site due to a likely phishing scheme,” Microsoft said in a statement published on a company blog on Monday. “Upon learning of the issue, we immediately requested that the credentials be removed and launched an investigation to determine the impact to customers.”
As a security measure Microsoft has blocked access to all users of the accounts whose details were put up. Actual users will have to fill up a form to be able to access their accounts.
The website where the details were published is pastebin.com. According to further reports, additional details of another 20,000 email accounts, containing login credentials for Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Comcast and Earthlink accounts, were also put up on the site.
Paul Dixon, who runs the pastebin site confirmed that this had happened and the site was taken down temporarily as a security measure. The site is intended to help software devleopers and Dixon is working on modifying the site so that this does not happen again.
