OH MIGHTY FLIST, INFO PLS?
This morning I woke to find that someone quite evil grabbed my hotmail account's address list and sent out spam (or possibly worse) to the people on it. The email looks like it's from Telzey Amberdon, which is my hotmail name. It bounced to a lot of defunct addresses I still had in there. I can still get into my hotmail account, I wasn't locked out, but I changed the password because, what the hell, why not.
How did these guys get hold of my email address book? Did they actually hack my email account with my password, or did they do it by using the new Facebook-like connectivity Hotmail and Gmail seem to be trying to constantly force on us in new and clever ways? Any suggestions, other than "change your password", which I've done? I went into my account info and zeroed out all the "Isn't it neat how we're sharing all your personal info with your friends!" crap they build in, with friends being able to access all sorts of things on your account. This should not be the default, privacy should be the default!
EDITED TO ADD UPDATE: I got nothin' in my Hotmail "sent emails" folder, so this happened off-Hotmail! The spammers took info and ran and did not use my hotmail account itself to send their spam.
I recently tried to set up an Outlook account on my computer so that Hotmail would drop into it when I hit "send/receive" on my home computer, but was unsuccessful -- and my Hotmail address and password being input into Outlook were part of that attempt. Maybe the bad guys got the info that way? NOT A KLEW.
EDITED AGAINDeleted the second half of my post because I figured out how to get rid of a defunct alternate email address... man, they don't make it easy.
How did these guys get hold of my email address book? Did they actually hack my email account with my password, or did they do it by using the new Facebook-like connectivity Hotmail and Gmail seem to be trying to constantly force on us in new and clever ways? Any suggestions, other than "change your password", which I've done? I went into my account info and zeroed out all the "Isn't it neat how we're sharing all your personal info with your friends!" crap they build in, with friends being able to access all sorts of things on your account. This should not be the default, privacy should be the default!
EDITED TO ADD UPDATE: I got nothin' in my Hotmail "sent emails" folder, so this happened off-Hotmail! The spammers took info and ran and did not use my hotmail account itself to send their spam.
I recently tried to set up an Outlook account on my computer so that Hotmail would drop into it when I hit "send/receive" on my home computer, but was unsuccessful -- and my Hotmail address and password being input into Outlook were part of that attempt. Maybe the bad guys got the info that way? NOT A KLEW.
EDITED AGAINDeleted the second half of my post because I figured out how to get rid of a defunct alternate email address... man, they don't make it easy.