If you’re a Hotmail user, next time you get an email from your “friend” that clearly isn’t from your friend at all, select the “My friend’s been hacked!” option from the “Mark as” menu and from there, Microsoft will investigate the report and then help your friend recover their account.
Additionally, Microsoft has also made it harder for users to set easily hackable passwords to begin with. Users will no longer be able to set simple passwords like “password” and “12345678″.
Hey! My friend’s account was hacked! [Windows Team Blog]
Stove
Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 5:14 PMFrom the looks of it, it’ll only take a couple of reports to mark any specific account as compromised. At that point, the user cant even access their account without going through the recovery process – and quite a few users won’t have their recovery details up to date.
The result: a few people with a grudge or one guy with half a dozen hotmail accounts will now be able to lock you out of your email far more easily than before.
Sam G
Sunday, July 17, 2011 at 7:40 PMOnly if you’ve received emails from them on all those accounts though?
Cameron
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 8:28 AMHow will you get emails to report in the first place?
Mr Biggles
Monday, July 18, 2011 at 7:53 AMYou can tell a top notch email service by its need to have a ‘my friend’s been hacked’ option…