

Thousands of Hotmail users hacked - baha_man
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8291268.stm

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fossuser
While I dislike hotmail as much as the next person, emails being 'hacked' and
people stupidly falling for a phishing attempt are two different things.

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skolor
I cannot emphasize this enough. While phishing is definitely a threat, calling
it "hacking" creates a massive problem. Imagine, for example, if grand theft
auto was referred to as identity theft. If they become synonymous in the
public mind, many people will begin to think "Well, I have a safe that I keep
all my information in, so no one can take anything from me."

The problem is the method for protecting yourself from anything, from car
theft to identity theft to having your email account hacked, all have
different methodologies. The best way to protect users from phishing. In fact,
that's about the only way to do it. Calling it hacking means that people start
to think "Oh, I have a firewall, so I'm safe." I've heard that from far too
many users, frequently after they've fallen for a phishing scam "What? The
firewall doesn't stop that?"

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rick2047
I can too agree we must tell people that its not hacking but phisihing so they
can be better aware of threats like these.

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kingsley_20
I had my hotmail hacked with a plain old dictionary attack (it was an
extremely rare word, but still). While I hadn't used it in years, at some
point I seem to have synced it with Plaxo, so it had all of my contacts, who
were all now the recipients of various kinds of spam. Sucky.

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slig
If you want to do some password research, you can still find the list on
google cache.

