My hotmail constantly trying to be hacked..

Associate
Joined
4 Jun 2013
Posts
88
Hey guys, quick question here as it's concerning me a little.

On one of my old emails I stopped using a while ago due to spam, someone keeps trying to gain access to this. I noticed as I keep getting emails on my main telling me that I requested to change my password, from somewhere in China (go figure). I have already changed the password on it to something more secure but is there anything else I should do?
I'm kinda worried that they'll hack it and take information from it which could lead to other services being hacked that I've used the same password for!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! :)
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Make sure you are taking advantage of two factor authentication - makes it much harder to be hacked though it can be a pain as unfortunately the implementations used by so many companies are arse over backwards :(

I've seen a big rise in account hacking attempts lately :( been getting a fair few password reset attempts, etc. over the last 2-3 weeks especially on my Paypal and Netflix for some reason.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
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2 factor authentication?

*edit*

holy carp, beaten twice! :D

I find 2FA so tedious to deal with it is annoying :( but saved me on a couple of accounts I'd forgotten about in the past - not that they'd have really got much useful out of them but still (forgot to update the passwords on them and looks like the old password somehow got compromised eventually probably via heartbleed).
 
Soldato
Joined
22 Oct 2005
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2,799
Location
Moving...
I've had a few reset password codes for my Hotmail account come through to my (linked) Gmail account. Was a bit worried but I have 2FA on both accounts and use different passwords on both.

Still a bit nervous as I'd lose so much stuff if I lost access to that account.
 
Associate
Joined
1 Apr 2018
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1,192
Had this today as well. Checking the security menu shows attempted logins from loads of countries around the globe.

Searched Google earlier and plenty of threads on Microsoft from people with the same issue.
 
Associate
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19 May 2009
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Location
Nottingham
I'm getting tons of this at the minute as well and have been for the last few weeks now. It seemed to start shortly after lock down...........

I know the address in question has made it onto some of the various pastebin style leaks and it hasn't had the password associated with it in those leaks in years, as well as now having 2FA as well, but it looks like mines getting 5-10 failed attempts every day!
 
Joined
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12,813
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Sunny Stafford
This happened to me back in April and I created a thread about it. Bots were trying to guess passwords or request password resets for generic sites like eBay, Amazon, Argos, Curry's, Asda, Tesco, Steam, BT and Just-Eat.

https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/threads/just-had-a-load-of-password-reset-emails.18883139

The general response however was that nobody else on OcUK was affected. I know I wasn't alone though as my old uni friend was getting the same password reset emails / text messages with the same timestamps. The most concerning account was my Brewdog (brewery) account as that's pretty niche compared to the more generic accounts that I listed above e.g. Amazon.

It went on throughout most of April then it suddenly stopped. General advice was to change passwords to stronger ones and use 2FA as much as possible. Also, disable your security questions as that's another avenue for attackers.

Weirdly enough, the haveibeenpwned site came back negative for me, and it's still showing up negative now in June.
 
Man of Honour
Joined
13 Oct 2006
Posts
90,821
Weirdly enough, the haveibeenpwned site came back negative for me, and it's still showing up negative now in June.

I get the impression a lot of information has been leaked via things like heartbleed but a lot of the information is buried in massive amounts of junk/noise data that is slowly being sifted through and/or processed over time with some actual credentials being pieced together from time to time, etc.
 
Soldato
Joined
7 Nov 2006
Posts
6,113
Location
Nottingham
Hey guys, quick question here as it's concerning me a little.

On one of my old emails I stopped using a while ago due to spam, someone keeps trying to gain access to this. I noticed as I keep getting emails on my main telling me that I requested to change my password, from somewhere in China (go figure). I have already changed the password on it to something more secure but is there anything else I should do?
I'm kinda worried that they'll hack it and take information from it which could lead to other services being hacked that I've used the same password for!

Any advice would be greatly appreciated! :)

See if your email appears on here :

https://haveibeenpwned.com/
 
Joined
10 May 2004
Posts
12,813
Location
Sunny Stafford
I get the impression a lot of information has been leaked via things like heartbleed but a lot of the information is buried in massive amounts of junk/noise data that is slowly being sifted through and/or processed over time with some actual credentials being pieced together from time to time, etc.

Ah that does make sense. That's especially with the lag between me + uni friend being hit and then others on here being hit now in June. It will be staggered.
 
Capodecina
Soldato
Joined
30 Jul 2006
Posts
12,129
Does ANYONE still use Hotmail :confused:

And in answer to your question, go back into the old Hotmail account you stopped using a while ago, delete absolutely everything in it, change your password to something totally obscure, forget it and never return.

Oh, and, change the passwords on the "other services" ;)
 
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