Hotmail Snag Causes Infection on Innumerable Computers

Some leading security companies state that whenever a Microsoft software or service develops a problem, innumerable users worldwide become infected. In one such incident, people using the Hotmail E-mail service of Microsoft (now called Windows Live Mail) confronted with a similar snag on February 16, 2010.

As per the available reports, users of Windows Live Mail who attempted to access their e-mail accounts couldn't succeed logging into them. Instead they found a message -"service unavailable." Consequently, several Hotmail users became perplexed. A few even perceived the reason for the snag as some new virus or Trojan.

Meanwhile, the BlackHat goons picked up the news about Hotmail's latest snag extremely fast. This prompted eSoft, a network security company, to announce that the information about the Hotmail problem proliferated online like wildfire.

Patrick Walsh, CTO of eSoft, cautioned e-mail users about the free Hotmail utility. He also cautioned that a report of Google Trends revealed that the Hotmail problem-related search terms gained an extremely high popularity. Moreover, all the terms pointed to hijacked web-links that tried to serve malicious software to unsuspecting visitors, as reported by Infosecurity-us on February 17, 2010.

The security company also revealed that on February 16, 2010, the search term leading to the greatest destruction was "Hotmail service unavailable." Other risky search terms were "Hotmail not working" and "Hotmail down."

However, soon after the snag and its associated malicious activities by cyber criminals occurred, Microsoft became engaged in remedial action.

It fixed the problem in 60-minutes. According to the software giant, afterwards customers couldn't access the service for sometime, as reported by SciTechBlog on February 16, 2010.

Arthur De Haan, Windows Live Spokesman, said that a server had become inoperative and caused heavy load to the remaining servers. Moreover, although a fresh one was introduced, some time was lost in tackling the logjam due to the attempted sign-ins, and in reallocating that load among the already working servers.

De Haan wrote on Microsoft's authorized 'Inside Windows Live' blog that the company was assuring it would investigate the problem in detail and would do everything necessary to prevent any such occurrence again.

Related article: Hotmail Account Holders Vulnerable to Latest E-mail Scam

» SPAMfighter News - 3/2/2010