Protect Your Email

This morning we received several calls, indicating they are having problem sending emails to Hotmail. We went right into the investigation without much delay. After several hours of testing and going thru the huge mailing log, we discovered that one of the user's email account in the server was compromised, and has been misused by spammer because of the weak password "12345".

The good thing is, the user was using Microsoft Outlook to check his email, thus the spammer is not able to see his email as those emails was already downloaded to the user's computer. However the spammer is still able to access his email account to send out 109,893 emails to hotmail, and this is the reason why our server was blocked by hotmail. We have rectify the issue and has step up the security to prevent such incident.

How can you prevent it from happening to you?

1. use a strong password, recommend to use 8 alphanumeric
2. avoid using words that can be found on the dictionary as your password
3. change your password once every 2-3 months.
4. make sure your computer is free from malicious software such as trojan horse where hackers are able to obtain your password
5. download your emails and clear the emails away from the webmail by using installed email software such as Microsoft Outlook
6. do NOT send your password via emails.

The above pointers can definitely reduce the possibility of been hacked, but you cant really stop a determine hacker.