We’re receiving reports via Neowin that thousands of Hotmail passwords have been leaked via pastebin.com, a tool used primarily by developers to share code snippets.
Neowin claim to have seen part of the list posted and can confirm the accounts are genuine and most appear to be based in Europe. The list includes details of over 10,000 accounts starting from A through to B, which implies there may very well be additional lists from C-Z.
Microsoft owned Hotmail, MSN and Live.com accounts are believed to the only addresses leaked.
If you have an email address ending with any of the above, change your password and security question immediately.
This is breaking news, we will update if and when we receive more details.
If you have an email address ending with any of the above, please make everyone’s lives more pleasant and change to gmail.com immediately.
Timely news. Time to join Gmail! Ride the Google Wave!
I call BULLSHIT on this news item. This is a chain reaction to get the MS servers to overload. A hype induced DOS attack.
So quick lets all change our passwords at the same time!
I think some inside trader(s) is trying to manipulate the market by spreading some bogus lists. :D
It’s pretty easy to make a list of dummy e-mail accounts. Just make sure that the first 10 are real and have been seeded with bogus e-mails.
Or maybe it’s just Neowin trying to get some attention! Hmmm….maybe we’re all falling for a giant link baiting scheme. Let’s keep an eye on their Alexa rank.
I still call Bullshit on this whole thing.
I see little reason to doubt this couldn’t be true. About 6 months ago I found a phishing site which used a simple MSN chat worm to farm e-mail and password details from well over 100,000 account I saw in the Sql database it was populating.
Reported to the server host who killed it, but 10,000 in a file doesn’t sound unlikely.
BREAKING NEWS: Gmail & Yahoo passwords published online!
http://thenextweb.com/2009/10/05/guess-code-sharing-web-services-share-emails-passwords-year/
Bank details are also being stolen in coordinated phishing attacks! Shock horror!
But anti-Microsoft stories are much more fashionable. It must be so cool to jump on the bandwagon.