MegaSack DRAW - This year's winner is user - rgwb
We will be in touch
Ok tough one here, my freind (a 60 year old computer nonliterate person despite years of my tearing my hair out trying to teach her) has had her hotmail account hacked, she cannot get back in. So she went through the hotmail authentication process and they said that they could verify her details (despite giving every little bit of info).
So does anyone have any experience of this and can anyone help?
I had considered trying to hack the hacker to get the account back. But a bit of google shows its not straight forward..
Its happened to me too within the last 2 weeks. I tried to close the account but no luck. Now spam emails are being sent to all my friends! I'd not used the account in years so no idea how they got in.
i've not found a solution yet...
Easy solution, don't use hotmail. It's rubbish and constantly getting hacked
I have had a hotmail account for at least 10 years and it has never been hacked, I don't get a lot of spam and the spam I get is correctly filtered. I would email Hotmail and get them to shut the account down and start afresh with a stronger alphanumeric password.
Go to the Police they can sort this problem out.
don't use hotmail. It's rubbish and constantly getting hacked
Obvious troll is obvious. And, as is usual with trolls, wrong.
Time was, you could get into a Hotmail account with a broken biscuit. It's pretty secure these days though, unless your PC is compromised with a keylogger or some such, in which case all your email accounts are equally insecure. I've not seen any exploits targeting Hotmail's servers in some time (especially given that attacking the client is so easy by comparison, why bother).
When you set up Hotmail, don't you provide it with another email address for password recovery purposes? It's been a fair old time since I last created one, but I thought that was the case.
Has anyone looked at her PC to make sure it's clean? If it's still infected, if she does manage to recover the address then there's nothing to stop them hijacking it straight back again.
Most hotmail hacks (nowadays especially) are brute force attempts. Try all the obvious passwords (it's how my hotmail account was hacked). Choose strong passwords. Mixture of upper and lower case letters, numbers and special characters and no real words.
The most commonly used password in the world, is 'password'.
HoratioHufnagel - Member
Its happened to me too within the last 2 weeks. I tried to close the account but no luck. Now spam emails are being sent to all my friends! I'd not used the account in years so no idea how they got in.i've not found a solution yet...
This is exactly what happened to me, i also tried to close my account, with no luck, the only way I knew it wasn't closed was friends still telling me that they were receiving emails. I emailed hotmail and got no reply from my new email, so don't know if anything actually got done, none of my friends have said anything lately anyway, so maybe it has been sorted.
go to https://windowslivehelp.com/PasswordReset.aspx if you cannot / don't have an alternate email address setup hit continue and fill out the forms. Long winded I know but I used that process to recover a hotmail password and it was turned around in 24hrs.