I never thought I’d say this, but I’m pleasantly pleased with Microsoft, particularly their Hotmail division (I know, “pleased” and “hotmail” in the same sentence — go figure).
I have a couple of Hotmail accounts. One that I use for spam that comes from search engine submissions and the other for my MSN Messenger account in Trillian. Otherwise, I don’t really use them much. I log into them both weekly to make sure that the accounts stay active so they’ll work in Trillian, however.
Yesterday (Wednesday), I made the attempt to log into the latter of those two accounts, and couldn’t, it was giving me a password error. I know I never changed the password, but OK, whatever, so I went to get their password reminder screen, and it gave me my password reminder question as follows:
@####$$%%#$%546””””””””45^6’456#%^^$&@$&$@&$%^$%^$%g554
Yes, that was it. That was obviously not the question I set up originally. Not hoping for much, I e-mail their support department. I wasn’t really miffed about losing the account, but I was miffed that somebody out there might be pretending to be me (as the account had my name in it, so it’s obviously my account), and also because I had a bunch of people on my MSN Messenger list in Trillian that I didn’t want to lose.
Surprisingly, I got an e-mail from Hotmail the very next morning. I was stunned. I didn’t expect to hear anything from them, if at all, for at least a week or two considering the horror stories that I had read about on Google. After drilling through their 11 questions that they asked to verify my identity, e-mailed back, they reset the account, and I was good to go.
So I am happy to say that my Hotmail account works fine again, I’ve changed my password to something horribly complicated, and everything is good to go. Kudos to Microsoft.
Comments
You’re not alone. A friend of mine had her Hotmail account ‘hacked’ last year and the person changed the password and secret question. She contacted Hotmail and went through a similar process and eventually got her account back.
I’ve no idea what my secret question is but I never use my Hotmail account for anything important anyway.
How complicated were your passwords? I ask because, if someone is succeeding at some kind of brute force hacking system (perhaps hit hotmail from random IP addresses trying random usernames from a pool with dictionary attack addresses, and they can’t disable one username or one IP to prevent it.. just a thot :P) then it would be good to know what levels of password complexity they’ve had success cracking, since their method /may/ apply to other webmail sites, or any kinds of sites, as well 🙁
My password that was used before on there was alphanumeric 7 characters with 3 numbers, so midly complex (not as complex as I use at many places, but still 62^7 = 3 521 614 606 208). There was nothing word-like about it, either, so it certainly wasn’t a dictionary-based attack.
So, really, I don’t know what to tell ya.
I have had my hotmail account hacked yesterday, I contacted the hacker thru msn from another hotmail account, he/she asked me 20 dollars via E-gold to give me my account back, I denied to pay, told him/her I wasn’t gonna a single a dime for it. I wrote to the spanish Hotmail support last night (soporte@hotmail), nothing this morning, so I decided to write to the english support department ([email protected]), I really hope they can help me cause I have 8 years with that account, I have all my family, friends and related on the msn plus I have some other related accounts signed on that email account, some of them are money related accounts.
I’ve been hacked, my pasword has been changed, my secret question has been changed ( to : wat nu? ). This is a big problem, my emails are important and sometimes money-related, my msn-contacts are very important. Somebody is using my identity. I send this email to hotmail, I received an answer that didn’t helped me at all … How did you contacted them?
Thanks in advance
hiya there sum one last nite has took em off mi msn becuase it loged meof sayin i was logged onto another computer and wen i cum bk to sign in it says mi password and secret questrion hass ben changed adn i need to know how to get bk onto mi acount write back please ASAP ITS AN EMERGANCIE
sum1 logged into my msn messenger account few weeks ago but they didnt change my password, they just changed my secret question so i can get onto my account but i cant change my password apart from by email, so they can change all my info and i can read it but not change it. i fink it wa one of my m8s coz they know the name of my old family pet and my password was pretty easy to guess anyway,
DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO CHANGE YOUR SECRET QUESTION WITHOUT KNOWING THE ANSWER COZ ITS SO IMPORTANT?!?!?!?!?!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
this chick got al pissed off at me and changed my hotmail password and secret question… i never told her my password ever! i don’t know how got on but she did and i have my life on there… i have college scouts coaches mlb scouts job stuff and buncha other stuff… i need to get back on to my account can sumone help me plzzzzzzzzzzzzzz… n help me get the bitch back 🙂 thank you
Hi! I need to contact hotmail support about my p/w and question. What is the best contact details for them? As I have emailed them about 5x so far!
helo
does anyone know how to change your password without knowing the answer to your secret question coz people hack into ur account
Hiya ppl, i got hacked last nite. The person was using my friends old account and asked me 2 go on webcam wen i refused they said fine then im going to hack your account and send your picture 2 terrorists!By then i rushed 2 my hotmail account and tryed 2 change my password but by that time they had changed my secret question. ive contacted hotmail but got no reply. im upset as all my family and friends were on there!who would do this? And what do i do 2 get it back! i have also reported it 2 the police!
Hiya ppl, last night my daughter is on mesenger and same thing happened somebody was asking my 12 year old daughter to go on webcam and if she refused the person will hack to her account. As a mother, seeing this happenning is so scary so i tried delaying the conversation and going in her account and sure enough the password had been reset. All of my daughters contact are from her school. And if this person tried to go on her account and starts chatting with her friends or emailing them things that is not school appropriate, and gets in the school it will cause a lot of damage. I dont know what to do. I have emailed the [email protected] and hoping that they will reset the password for her but i dont have anything back yet. so what do i do… so has anybody have a better idea on how to get this password faster?
Hi guys
i just got hacked also i have no idea how this is occuring. changed my sercet question and my alternative email address but they are using it. it’s like they hacked it for the fun of it me very annoyed i made a new account and also emailed support i havent got a reply yet and my new account was just hacked my password is very high now if it gets hacked again its really beyound me
i have set up all the secutiry possible on my machines i am a IT guy so i know a bit but this really sux like the rest say lost all my contacts and all my emails thanks werido hacker all i got to say it what comes around comes around bitch!!
This is NOT good! Somebody guessed my password for MSN not long ago! And to make things better, they ALSO changed my freakin secret question! Yah! now i dont even know how to get it back. I lost ALOT of contacts, ALOT of emails and ALOT of GOOD pictures!!! This is HORRIBLE! Do any of you guys know how do get it back after they changed my password and secret question? I need HELP!!!
Who do you email about having your account hacked? It happened to me yesterday and my secret question has been changed to Turkish, and I have really important emails in there that I need to check.
my id got hacked yesterday there were lots of important emails and my contacts my pictures were also there i dont remeber my secret question help me plz
i changed my password and i cant remember what i changed it to but now i have a different one for a little bit until i can firure out my other one and the msn helper thing never did shit but my new msn is [email protected] if u no a way i can fix it please e-mail me later
I didnt get my hotmail account hacked.. but my ex apparently remembered my password and changed it along with the secret question.
I also contacted support just a min ago and hope i will receive their help tomorrow.
We are all lucky that hotmail has a Support Service, since actually not a lot of ‘Free ‘ accounts have, but maybe its because they have both Paid and Free services.
Same thing happened to me, my MSN got hacked. It was about 2 days ago. I finally found out how to contact MSN 30 minutes ago. I emailed them my problem.
A guy from MSN groups has a vengance of Efeds, so he hacks all the good ones and changes all of the mods passwords so they cant change the site back to normal.
Luckily my friend (the only other person who was hacked) figured out MSN has a lock on it. Up at the top where your adress of the site your on, if you try to sign into hotmail and it doesnt work, check that out. There will be a lock most likely up there. That means MSN has done something about it and locked your account for a week or many. So keep that in mind.
oh by the way if you notice the lock, dont try to sign in for a while, it will reset the lock!
My husband just made an account last week and then two days later he couldn’t log back into it. When trying to identify himself and answering the secret question, the question was this: Sevdiğiniz tarihsel kişilik. That’s not even in English anymore. If anybody could help, that would be great.
my email has been hacked like 5 days ago and it’s giving me a headache because my email is very important and mostly money-related and i had pictures. I need help… the support team didn’t help at all. plz help.
My hotmail account was hacked on New Years Day. They then hacked my ebay account and changed passwords and secret questions in both. I immediately contacted Hotmail Support under the password reset area. They responded with an automated response immediately and asked me to reply to that email if I wasnt happy with that reponse. I replied and a real person from support emailed me back with 12 questions that only I could answer. As I opened the account 8 years ago and have never changed my password, I had difficulty remembering some answers. Some of the questions were folders you have created, the IP addresses of the computers you use to access hotmail etc. I answered the questions and they sent me a link to reset my password. I was only out of my account for 3 days! I am EXTREMELY happy with the Hotmail Support team and now very scared as to how someone actually got into my account – I wonder if they can do it again? Obviously I have changed my password to a strong one and I never use the remember me function on any PC.