Spammer hacking Hotmail accounts?
 

Was checking my personal e-mail account I use for friends and family when I saw a message I recognized by the formatting of the sender name as being from my old Hotmail account I've had since '97 but never use now. All of the recipients were visible, and it consisted of everyone in that Hotmail account's address book (no one else), which happened to also have my ISP e-mail addy in it, so I got a copy of the message there.

The Subject line said: Help
The body was:

Hi! How are you?
I started my own website! Can you check it?
It's http://www.sitename.net/test . Did you see video?
Thank's!

It had the footer that Hotmail adds to messages and appeared to have actually been sent from the account.

I doubt it is spyware/worm related on this PC as all updated scans are clean and I have not set up any e-mail accounts since formatting a couple weeks ago. If it were simply a case of a harvested addy being used to send spam it seems there would have been recipients other than the accounts own addy book...

Anyone got a clue? Randomly using Hotmail accounts to spam their own address books would sure be one way to fly under MSNs spam radar:eek7

I've deleted all the entries in the address book except my own so I can monitor...

BTW, I edited out the "sitename" for this post while I investigate and eliminate all possibilities on my end so as to not cast suspicions on any innocent site operator. The spam link was a US based domain.

:2 cents: if you send someone and email that you also sent to everybody else thier email address will be in the "sent to" section... available to see for everybody u sent too

I never send e-mail from that account (this message was marked 3 days ago) and I have never used Send to All from that account.

Bump for the day crowd...

I have checked everything I can think of and everything seems to point to the mail actually having been sent from the Hotmail account, whether manually or mechanically.

This smells like something big, I highly doubt someone went to the trouble to crack into only my old Hotmail account just to send test spam to it's relatively small and mostly dead address list...

:question :question :question

Doesn't a hotmail account expire after 3 weeks? maybe be grabbed it somehow and everything was still there? :S

Sucks whatever happened, good luck getting the bastard.

Hotmail accounts go into "hibernation" after 60 days. You can reactivate them any time after that just by logging in, although any messages from before will be gone. They don't expire the accounts because the addresses are tied into .NET Passport and MSN Messenger as user IDs.

Even if the accounts did expire and someone was able to grab the old account name they would have to choose their own password at the time of creating a new account with the address. Nothing was changed in my Hotmail account, including the password (I logged in to it immediately when I saw the message from it to all of it's own address book:upsidedow).

mail <>< ing

:(

sounds like they got you. happened to me a while back.

just check this out

What is that? How does it affect a web-based e-mail account?