My hotmail address has been hijacked. Do I need to change it?

[MrsMuddle]

An email has been sent to everyone in my hotmail address book, advertising a company in China.

The thing is my address is my first name and my last name, and I really want to keep it. I've had it for about 15 years.

Do I need to change the address or the password or something else completely? I've run a virus scan that's come back clear. This is the first time something like this has happened, and it's really pissed me off. I'm in the middle of applying for jobs, and the email has gone to some potential employers that I've been emailing. The wording of the email isn't bad enough to make it immediately obvious that it's not from me - they'll just think I'm a weirdo.

[MrsMuddle]

Anyone? Please...

[onager]

I suppose you are no worse off if you change the password. Choose something longer with underline characters, upper and lower case, numbers and so on. As many special characters as it allows.

In the long run hackers seem to be always trying to break into hotmail accounts. Maybe you should get a paid for email package. If you picked @muddle.com or whatever you could then have several accounts all ending in @muddle.com

[onager]

Oh and don't be too embarrased. The potential employers will have had this kind of thing themselves.

[MrsMuddle]

That's a good idea Onager. Thanks for that. The whole family has hotmail addresses, so we could all get new ones.

[frogs]

I've just had exactly this, MrsM, I posted about it here a couple of days ago.

I've changed the password, but am going to set up an email account with my ISP I think, and delete all the contacts from my hotmail.

[MrsMuddle]

It's really annoying, isn't it? Just to let you know, my ebay account was frozen because someone hijacked that too and tried to sell a pair of fake uggs. But I wasn't getting emails from ebay telling me they'd frozen my account because the ebay.com address had been added (not by me!) to my blocked senders list. It must be all connected. If you have an ebay account, it might be worth checking it out.

[maddoguk]

I understand where your all coming from. Strong passwords are really important e.g. Upper and lower case and numbers. e,g P455w0RD is a strong password all be it you would never choose that. Avoid common words and its worth joing words together e.g 5H3llo17 would spell shelloil which is not exactly something you would think of.

easy passwords are easy pickings for people.

ebay and hotmail are not linked, ie one is microsoft and the other is a company in its own right. Microsoft hotmail blocked senders list is a nightmare in that it seams to add people randomly to its blocked senders list so you can not really link the two.

[MrsMuddle]

That's a relief, maddoguk. I'm getting paranoid - I'd imagined someone hacking into my ebay, then hacking into my hotmail to make sure that I could never get emails from ebay... Do you think it's just coincidence that the two accounts have been hijacked?

[frogs]

My ebay account is fine, MrsM, I've just checked. But will be upgrading all my passwords to everything, just to be on the safe side.