HOTMAIL ALERT

I can’t believe this old fake phishing scam to steal your hotmail account is still being sent – its a variation of a spam email from years ago – but this has better English apart from a few spelling mistakes –  and is possibly going to catch more people out.

We’ve seen these types of phishing scams on Twitter and Facebook a lot lately but none on Hotmail for a while. As far as I know.

What is phishing.

Phishing is attempting to acquire information (and sometimes, indirectly, money) such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. Communications purporting to be from popular social web sites, auction sites, online payment processors or IT administrators are commonly used to lure the unsuspecting public. Phishing emails may contain links to websites that are infected with malware

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing

The email seemingly from Windows Live ( Anti-spam team) states..

We are sending this e-mail to inform you that your e-mail account has excedeed it’s sending and receving limit in the last 7 days. Due to this, we have to suspend your account in order to prevent unwanted bots and spyware using our customer’s accounts.

The link is obviously bogus and I won’t post it here.

It looks official enough but the first thing that alerts me is – The spelling mistakes! Really, would Microsoft send out emails with spelling mistakes, but mostly because I don’t use this account! I do receive an few odd emails but I never send from it, so for me to have exceeded a limit over the last seven days would be pretty crazy.

Also not only would Microsoft not email you, unless you had emailed them for support or something,  they wouldn’t be suspending your account and they certainly wouldn’t use a dodgy email address to send it from like this one.

Please do not click this link, this will allow the hacker to take over your account.  If you get anything like this regarding any social media sites, bank accounts or such like with a link on, never click the link, go through to your account the normal way and ask them if they have emailed you or search for the answer.

I have now had a 2nd Email from a different email address, this is just to scare you into clicking the link.

The word phishing comes from the word fishing because it is a bait to get you to bite by clicking the malicious link.

Someone asked me this in the comments so I am putting it here

I clicked the link, what do I do now?

If you can change your password, do it right away – and check that no emails have gone out from your account –  if some have, send an email  to inform your friends that the email fake. you were hacked but you are fixing it.

Then do a full system scan, just to be sure.

Be Safe.