Watch out when logging into Hotmail or any other site.

Hi All

I have a hotmail email account and some time back I suffered a hack into this email account, At the time I thought it had been some sort of spyware or even worse a key logger that had somehow infected my PC. Ever since I have always logged in with an incorrect password first and then finally my correct PW with no further problems.

I have noticed since doing this that there are times when hotmail allows an attempted log on without security. At times the initial screen displays as a http rather than https.

My understanding is that when its https it encrypts the entered data and thus prevents the log on info being sniffed as against when its http only anyone can sniff these packets and see the data entered (with appropriate software)

So now I have come to the conclusion that my hotmail account was hacked not throuigh a lack of security on my PC but rather slack programming by hotmail. This seems to be borne out by the number of people who have had their email accounts hacked.

Anyway, I though I would mention it as something you should look out for not only with hotmail but any other log on screen.

Cheers
 
Something i discovered after I had a keystroke hacker was a glitch with my email provider too. Sus emails I was receiving I wasn't opening them, but marking as spam. When I'd go into my spam file, they were marked as being opened. I started just deleting the spam and the prob stopped.
 
The other contents of the spam folder that had gone there automatically were marked as unopened. So would that mean I definately didn't have setting enabled to mark spam as open by default? Thanks, I did ask the internet provider at the time but I couldn't understand their answer.
 
well it depends

from memory there are two options
one to mark all spam as 'opened' and another - when you manually mark something as 'spam' mark it as 'opened'
also depending on how your client is setup (in particular if you use preview pane) the mere fact that you are highlighting an e-mail to mark it as spam might be enough for it to be marked as 'opened'

but it all depends on the mail client and how it's setup
 
Hotmail accounts get hacked usually because of poor passwords, secondly via key stroke loggers. The https/http is just a way of sending the password encrypted to Hotmail's servers... this stops a man-in-the-middle attack (where someone inbetween yourself and Hotmail's servers is listening in on the traffic).

Do yourself a favour and close down your Hotmail account, then go a get yourself a shiny Google Mail (Gmail) account from http://gmail.com.

You can use Google Mail completely over https, plus their accounts don't get hacked (assuming you keep trojans off your Windows PC AND don't have an easy-to-guess password).
 
^exactly and use the on screen keyboard to enter your passwords for anything like banking, email etc.. (prevents key loggers logging your strokes since your just clicking the letters with your mouse on your screen)
 
key generators spend 24/7 generating username and password combinations.

it's inevitable that one out of a thousand emails gets hacked.
 
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