My hotmail was hacked yesterday..

The title said it all...

Yesterday morning, I was very shocked to see many un-delivered posmaster notification emails in my hotmail inbox. When I checked, it showed that spammy messages has been delivered from my inbox.

What the heck, I didn/t send those, and then I realize something, my hotmail vacation reply was 'on' and inside there was spammy messages, advertising about a shop in China. I turned it off and deleted the content and off to do some other stuffs.

When I logged into window live messanger, I saw all my contact gone... none of them were there. I rechecked my hotmail again and yes.. all the contacts there were gone... damn it ...

So, I googled abt my problem and came across the window live support forum... I found that I was not the only one facing this issue. Many hotmail users were reporting this incident.. what happened? I don't know... but I contacted the window live messanger and the hotmail support team abt this.

Leah from window live messanger helped recovered my window live messanger contact list. And the Isabel from Window Live Support helped recovered most of my hotmail contacts. Thank you ladies :)

After all that happened, I changed my password to make it stronger.. well, i tried to make it as strong as my Agilent NT password... LOL...I changed the trick questions and put in different secondary emails there.

Lesson learned.. changed your password regularly and make it a stronger one. Mix it with alphabet, capital, numbers and special character...

When I browse through the forum support thread, one comment caught my interest. This guy mentioned that the problem is not mostly due to the password itself but inherent to the security flaws in hotmail, making it a target to hackers and spammers.

I just hope that the window product team will improve on this and make it safer for everybody to use it. Yes, there is gmail (that I'm also using) but I still like my hotmail account...so I'm not going to ditch it yet..