WARNING - Hotmail Accounts Hacked

[Joshua]

I have now spent the last 6 hours resetting all my accounts with banks, ebay, xmarks, itunes etc etc because some computer nerd thinks its a laugh to make other peoples lives a misery. Thanks to the idiot who perpetrated this hacking I have now lost personal emails and online receipts, letters from my daughter and much more.

Needless to say I am BL@@DY annoyed.

Guid on ye for changing all your passwords - but don't blame us nerds and good guy hackers or lump us in with the bad guys.

Keep in mind it's a very lucrative business to the less affluent sections of the world - say a site makes $.10/click on a website - say 4,000,000 emails go out and only 10% are clicked - equalling $40,000. Now, imagine that advertisement website also installs a payload/virus that encourages the viewer to click 7-8 other advertisements on an hourly basis, well, we know that not all viruses stick, so let's say 10% of the 10% actually make it through and are accessing 8 different ad sites on an hourly basis. 40,000 computers, making $.10 per click, hitting 8 ads per hour - that comes out to $32,000.

Finally, that payload that got installed also installs a data mining program that steals sensitive data. Let's say another 10% (for the sake of argument, 4,000 people) had social security numbers or saved credit card numbers on their computer. The bad guy turns around and sells that information to a fence for identity theft at around $5/record - there's another $20,000. AND if that data-mining results in usernames/passwords for e-mail and facebook accounts? The bad guy now has new things to exploit for the next 4,000,000 spam messages he is going to send out.

So, the misconception here is that the computer "nerd" is having a laugh. Rather, he is using your e-mail account as a vessel to send out this nasty, nasty stuff to make money. If these guys did this crap just for fun, we would not see it as widespread and ugly as it is today. Don't believe for a second it's a joke, it's crime and it's quite serious.

Better advice would be to make sure you have a secure e-mail provider, one that supports two-factor authentication and use the two-factor authentication (Google/Gmail sends you a text message with a code if you sign into a computer it doesn't recognize), and have a secure password.

This is what I do for a living (whup up on bad guy hackers) by the way. :-)