Hacking Hotmail Accounts is Easy

It is not a stretch, based on the following chart of Google keywords searched, to surmise people with hotmail email accounts are more susceptible to hacker attacks than other free webmail accounts.

Google trends of hacked mail searches over the past year

Of 1,583 email addresses in my list of contacts, I observe 158 use yahoo.com addresses, 138 use gmail.com, and 30 use hotmail.com. (I assume the rest use formats like company.com.)

If you’re in the latter group, perhaps you or someone you know was the victim of a hotmail hacker attack? It’s not uncommon to read about hotmail attacks, such as what graced today’s Daily News when a government agency director’s account was hacked or otherwise phished and all of her contacts were scammed. (Why she uses hotmail.com and not townofnewbury.org is a mystery.)

I swore by hotmail–over 10 years ago! I was a die-hard yahoo mail user from 2001 to 2008; and converted to gmail last fall. I haven’t looked back. If for no other reason, gmail works great to trap spam from arriving in my inbox. I occasionally find false positives in the spam folder, but that’s the exception once a month and not the norm. The above chart indicates few gmail users search Google about their accounts being hacked–a good sign this particular webmail client works.

The best piece of advice I can provide you in the realm of online security is something I advised nearly a year ago: implement mnemonic passwords for your email account and online outposts. Every time I create a new username/password combination, I use a base and add specific letters and numbers to the beginnings and ends of the base.

For instance:

If the base is password and the two sites are Facebook and LinkedIn, I might create a Facebook password like F6password and a LinkedIn password like L12password. There is a mnemonic logic for using “6″ and “12″ and I can carry forth that logic to other passwords, such as an iTunes password of I9password.

The key is you shouldn’t use the same password on more than one occasion, except when you’re unconcerned about a hacker gaining access to the group of them. Farhad Manjoo offers more detail on his mnemonic system and why a common password could be sensical.

Even if you don’t change your passwords, how about considering shifting from hotmail to yahoo or gmail? It’s easy to convert. Give it a try?

Related posts:

1. GMail Suffers 2nd Outage in a Month
2. Hacking the Bejeweled Blitz Game on Facebook
3. SCAM ALERT: Beware LinkedIn Inbox Messages Asking You to Download Setup.exe

Tagged as: email, security

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