Hotmail Security, How to Report a Hacked Account

Dealing with hijacked Hotmail accounts has long been a top priority for the Hotmail team.  The Hotmail Safety and Security blog recently reported about an increase in hijacked accounts and spam emails sent to a account owner's contact list without their knowledge. 

Some of the symptoms reported to the Hotmail team by people whose account was hijacked include:

• Deleted contacts
• Deleted emails
• Safe sender's list is deleted
• Junk Mail Settings is set to Exclusive, which prevents mail from being delivered to the Inbox.

Unfortunately, the account owner is not always the first person to discover that their account has been hacked.  Instead, it is the recipients of the spam or phishing emails that arrived in their inbox from their friend's hacked account.

How to Report a Hacked E-Mail Account

Now, in addition to contacting your friend about the problem with their account, the Hotmail team is incorporating a way to report a compromised account.  

From the "Mark as" menu option, click the My friend’s been hacked!” option:

You can also report an account you believe is compromised while marking as Junk or moving it to the Junk folder:

What Happens After The Account is Reported

When Hotmail receives the report, the information is added to the other information from their compromise detection engine to determine if the account has been compromised.

If the reported account is a Yahoo! or Gmail account, arrangements have been made with those providers for the information to be forwarded to them to use in their respective systems to recover hacked accounts.

For Hotmail accounts identified as compromised, the following will occur:

• The spammer can no longer use the account
• When the account owner attempts to access their account, they will be referred to the account recovery process.