My hotmail account has been hacked.....what do I do?

[pipoca]

Do I need to do anything? It's sent out messages with some link in them to all the contacts in my address book. Is there anything I should do, or can I just ignore it? I have Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 but I don't think that helps with a hotmail account, does it? [clueless about all things techy emoticon]

You'll probably find if you try to log into it that Hotmail have put a block on your account until you can convince them that you are who you say you are (this happened to me recently). In principle you can ask them to send you a text message to confirm, but I've done that twice now and it's never arrived.

change your password to your account, this worked for me

I've logged in and it lets me and all looks normal. So, should I change my password?

"I have Kaspersky Internet Security 2012 but I don't think that helps with a hotmail account"

It depends....

It's possible that you haven't genuinely been hacked, it's easy to fake who an email claims to be sent from and lists of email addresses are easily harvested from those dodgy chain emails that go around.

However if you have been hacked then they might have just guessed your password or you might have been tricked into somehow providing it to them, in which case there's really nothing that software on your PC can do.

It should offer you some protection from things sniffing around on your PC and getting your details that way though.

However, as others have said, change your password ASAP.