Warning about Hotmail and other free email services

[Administrator]

Microsoft are investigating the on-going problem of hacked email accounts.
A few days ago, the details of tens of thousands of Hotmail email accounts were posted on the internet.
We urge all our members who use Hotmail accounts for entering competitions to change your password.
If you've been getting a lot of SPAM if would also be a good idea to change your Hotmail email address.

Free email services are regularly hacked and we strongly recommend that you never use a free email account when dealing with financial institutions such as Paypal or other on-line banking services.

To ensure the legitimacy of our members and protect the privacy of others, the Compingclub does not accept Hotmail or other free email service addresses during registration.

[chatee4]

Thanks for the warning admin. I use Yahoo mail for entering comps, Were they hacked as well? I have not had any spam with yahoo so far.

Its nice to have a heads up about these things. Thanks!

[Major Tom]

Yahoo was fine - it was only hotmail accounts that were attacked. I've had the same yahoo account for 8 years and it's never been hacked.

Another point is that you should never use the same password on your email account as on other sites - so if they get into your email account, they can't have a look through it for what other sites you are signed up to and use the same password to get into them. It is also a good idea to include numbers in your passwords, and don't make them real words. Two or three words and numbers mixed in together is harder to hack.

BTW - the email that were hacked were as a result of phishing - were the members clicked on a link to another site from an email.

be careful what you click on!!

[deejay]

Apparently Gmail and Yahoo mail have had the same treatment as Hotmail 

[Major Tom]

Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo! stressed that hackers did not breach their databases, but rather email users were conned into revealing information.

http://au.news.yahoo.com/a/-/technology/6149671/hackers-hook-web-email-users-with-phishing-scams/

If you think you might have clicked on something you shouldn't have, change your passwords!

[doc]

Hubbies Hotmail account was hacked some months ago. Changed the password to something unintelligible; no prollies since......

[heiding]

its good to replace letters with symbols, like @ for the letter a etc.  can make it a bit easier to remember the pw if its still a 'word'.