If you haven’t heard, everybody (like here, here and here in addition to a ton of other places) is talking how a Hotmail phishing attack happened and somewhere in the neighborhood of 20,000+ account passwords were leaked.

Use Hotmail and think your account is compromised? Well, if you happen to be in European user and your account name started with an A or B, probably. You’ll know if you attempt to login and can’t. It should be noted Microsoft responded to this immediately and is in the process of restoring accounts.

What caused this fracas to occur in the first place? As the title of this article indicates, phishing. This means a ton of people were fooled into simply giving over their account information. Where did the phishing occur? Social media. It was not an internal Microsoft system fault.

You could simply blame the account leaks on dumb internet users, but the difference today compared to yesteryear is that we now have web sites that routinely require our permission to interconnect.

For example, if you have a Flickr account and use another web service that accesses it, what happens on first use is that you must grant permission for the other site to use it. After you authorize it, the secondary web site can access the original Flickr account.

This is not a bad thing, but what is bad is that we see these authorization notices often, and many just consider it normal and that you should do it. Add to this that in social media these authorization requests all roughly look the same, and you can see where this can pose a problem.

With that said:

• If there is any email that asks you for your email account information, don’t do it.
• If when using social media (such as Facebook, MySpace or otherwise) it asks you for your email account information, don’t do it.
• Only check your mail within the mail system itself and not via any third-party source.

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