Hacking Yahoo or Hotmail, Is It Possible?

Within last 3 months, I faced two events, which caused me to seriously re-consider using hotmail or yahoo accounts for business chatting.

Yahoo Hacked:

Some one hacked my friend’s Yahoo account, and send an Email to all of his contacts that He is in Spain and in trouble. So please send me 500$ immediately through Western Digital in the name of Mr. XXXXXXXX.

That mail really created panic in his loved ones, and they started contacting him in other ways to find what happened to him.

He had a long list of contacts; some are business contacts and some from Family. So it is almost impossible to inform all of them that his ID is hacked. So we still don’t know if some one has actually send money or not.


MSN Hacked:

My Sister-in-law MSN account hacked, guy came online from her ID and start chatting with me. By the way she lives in Pakistan and I am in Dubai. In few sentences, I got suspect that he is not my Sister-in-law. So I asked him, who you are? Then he told he is a hacker, and he will hack my ID, if I remain online with him for 10 minutes. Now that was really interesting for me. I asked him how you can do so. And for my utmost surprise, I got a message; You are login to messenger form other computer.

Ahhhhhhh. I quickly login to Passport.com, changed my password and then login again. Thanks God, I was not using hotmail ID for signing in to messenger and hacker may not found that. Otherwise, I may have lost tons of contacts.

I contacted MSN Support, and took my Sister-in-law ID back. Their support is good and fast and after necessary verifications, they gave her URL to change her Password.


But is there a way, we can save ourselves from this type of hacking? I mean, I just can’t think of loosing my msn ID. Now Days, these chatting software have become an integral part of our internet life.

I have not found any answer for this question yet, but just giving here some tips, which i think can be useful. Atleast they will save you from amateur hackers.

1. Always take backup of your contacts and emails.
2. Use Strong Password. Must read guidelines given by MSN for Strong Password. In short, your password should not be a Dictionary word. It should not be the name of some one near by. And it should contains special characters and numbers also.
3. Must enter alternate Email Address. It will help you in some cases when you lost password.
4. Use secret Questions which are not easy to guess. For example, if you simply write your Pet name, and almost every friend knows what is your Pet name, What’s secret in it?