hotmail account hacked

[beastmonkey]

My hotmail account was used to send an email to all my contacts offering them cut price electricals at a discount price, it was in broken English so luckily everyone knew it wasn't from me.

I went into my hotmail account and it informed me the 'away on vaction' was activated, when I looked at this, the message that had gone out to my contacts was written in this section. I deleted the text and turned the 'away on vacation' off.

When I went to my inbox all my emails that I had received since february 12th had gone, and they weren't in the deleted file.

I have since changed my previous password, which I hasten to add was a strong password of numbers and letters, but I wonder whether I should change the whole email account and if anyone knows where the emails could have gone?

[AlBags]

They are gone now. Forget them.
Use a better service than Hotmail .. I have never trusted it in 10 years.
Even Yahoo is iffy, if you ask me.
Maybe Google mail is better for you now thay have sorted out their own security issues.

[squarebear]

Just changing the password will suffice. You will have been daft enough to fill something like this in:
www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/msn.htm

This lets the scammer know your email address and password and so can do whatever they like.

[squarebear]

http://www.square-bear.co.uk/mitsuku/msn.htm

[squarebear]

And some clown called "tina_t" has just filled their genuine details in on that form. I now know their email address and their password and have just logged in as them. I can now see their emails which shows me a lot more information about them and a few passwords/usernames for other websites.

Needless to say, I have no harm with that knowledge apart from informing her how stupid she has been.

Oh and Tina, if that pillow set doesn't come from eBay soon, I too would be chasing them up :-)

[society]

Squarebear you are too much a bear to be square. :-)

Does my name ring a bell? lol

[beastmonkey]

thanks for the help,

square bear i have not been daft enough to fill in any forms like that, i am at a loss as to how it happened, nevertheless it did.

oh well life goes on.

[Garmard]

I have had the same problem beastmonkey plus spam mail galore. Just change to Yahoo like i did and your problems will magically solve.

[ChuckFickens]

if you've not filled out a form like squarebears example above at any time the chances are you are using a single real word as your password and it's simply been guessed.

decent passwords should not be a real word such as "password" they should either be made up from letters numbers and even other symbols so they can't easily be guessed, so you'd use something like "passw0rd#"

If you change your password to something decent it should stop the problem.

[beastmonkey]

my password was a combination of letters and numbers including some capital letters a total of 14 characters, tell me how to make it stronger please

[sometimesit]

Add a couple of shift characters like +%^&*£" to your password and don't base it on a name or word.
Something like O94*pew$6 this should be strong