Have you ever received a email from your friend asking for some urgent help in the form of money as he got trapped somewhere or in some situation? The email later turns out to be a Spam or phishing email as your friend account may have got compromised. We all know that getting a account back is often a tough process as most users worldwide give random information while creating the email account instead of the real information.

Hotmail is rolling out two features to all its users which will help you protect your Hotmail accounts. The first lets you report a friend’s account as compromised – a feature unique to Hotmail – and the second prevents you from using common passwords that make your account easy to hack. As we all know that hackers target email accounts of friends of the hacked account by sending emails to everyone in the contact list and Good Friends can easily know that email is not real and a spam or phishing message just by looking at it or by calling the friend.

When you get that spam message supposedly from your friend, you just click “My friend’s been hacked!” on the “Mark as” menu.

You can also report an account as compromised when you mark a message as junk or otherwise move a message to the Junk folder.

Hotmail uses your message along with combination of loads of other factors, as a good indication of the Friends account being compromised. After they feel that the account is 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.

The second feature that is rolling out will prevent you from choosing a very common password when you sign up for an account or when you change your password. If you already have a common or very weak password, then you will be asked to change your password soon.

What is your opinion about this change? Share it here.

Via: Inside Windows Live