Hotmail now has ‘My Friend’s been Hacked!’ feature
We have all had the problem of receiving spam from friends’ email accounts from time to time. This may be a result of their accounts being compromised and sometimes a simple password change is sufficient. Sometimes it’s unknown to the the user that their account has been compromised and their passwords need to be change. The new ‘My Friend’s been Hacked!’ feature will allow you to mark spam email from friends as such and will put them through an “account recovery flow” when they next log in.
When a message is marked as junk, an option comes up to tick ‘I think this person was hacked!’ and the user gets the choice to ‘Keep contact’ or ‘Delete and block contact’.
Hotmail has additional plans to roll out a service that blocks the user from selecting commonly used passwords. Also in case you were wondering, this service works for all email accounts (yahoo, gmail) and not just Hotmail.
What happens under the hood
Our compromise detection system is always working in the background to detect unusual behavior. When we detect bad behavior from an account (like an account that suddenly starts sending spam), we mark that account as compromised. It’s a bit like your credit card company putting a hold on your account when they detect suspicious activity.
When you report that your friend’s account has been compromised, Hotmail takes that report and combines it with the other information from the compromise detection engine to determine if the account in question has in fact been hijacked. It turns out that the report that comes from you can be one of the strongest “signals” to the detection engine, since you may be the first to notice the compromise. So, when you help out this way, it makes a big difference!
Once we mark the account as compromised, two things happen:
- First and foremost, the account can no longer be used by the spammer.
- When your friend attempts to access their account, they’re put through an account recovery flow that helps them take back control of the account.
[Windows Live] | [via: engadget]
