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Scammers Expose Thousands of Hotmail Passwords, Microsoft Confirms

by Lee Bains on October 5, 2009 at 05:12 PM

Just today, news broke that an anonymous user of PasteBin.com, a legitimate site marketed to software developers, posted more than 10,000 Hotmail addresses and passwords to the site last Thursday. According to NeoWin, most of the addresses appear to belong to European users, and all seem to be authentic. As shocking as it may be to find out that a benign site like PasteBin could host (albeit unwittingly -- reports have come in suggesting that the PasteBin user account was hacked) such grossly illegal content, TheNextWeb tells us we shouldn't be particularly surprised. A recent blog post on the site reports that a quick Google search will yield several PasteBin posts containing the passwords for thousands of Hotmail, Yahoo!, and even Gmail accounts.

NeoWin has alerted Microsoft to the problem and PasteBin has taken down the original Hotmail posting. Still, we should all stay on our toes. Today would be a good day to change that e-mail password. It'll only take a couple minutes, and might save you a lot of grief. [From: NeoWin, via TheNextWeb]

Tags: email, gmail, hack, hotmail, security, top, YahooMail

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