A couple of weeks ago, I had a very surprising call from one of my friends. He asked as since when I had started to send spam mails from my Hotmail account.
I asked in return that how many he had received? And he replied, "More than a dozen..." And finally I ended up with an apology and explaining to him that this could have happened due to some malware hitting my PC.
But this was an absolute shocker for me!
As I am not a frequent Hotmail user, I seldom check my sent items. And this time it was full of sent emails that I myself had not sent and could not even imagine sending. It was more than embarrassing to have those scam mails sent to all of my contacts, including family, co-workers, some old friends and colleagues and God knows who else.
Assuming that it was some kind of trojan or virus, I scanned all my system, but found nothing. Important question for me was not to find about that trojan/virus but that while I logged in to all my accounts every once in a while including Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail, why in particular this trojan was able to get access to my Hotmail account? It could also play around with my Yahoo or Gmail accounts but it did not. Instead, it used Hotmail to send those 100s of emails which eventually ruined my respect and I had to provide explanation to a few of my close friends and colleagues.
Imagine the possibility of damage that little trojan can cause. If it can access my Hotmail to send some scam pharmacy emails, it may be able to read all my emails and send them to any third party. It may even cause some hackers to send those mails to any terrorist groups and create havoc for a person like me. A whole bunch of possibilities and breaches that anyone can imagine!
And on the whole, it makes me conclude that Hotmail is more prone to privacy intrusions than other service providers and Microsoft must take drastic measures to keep Hotmail email addresses safe and secure. It has to take Hotmail privacy seriously for Windows users.
