14 DAY TRIAL // Microsoft has added a new security feature to Hotmail which allow users to report accounts that they believe have been hijacked by spammers.
According to Microsoft, the idea behind the feature came from the fact that most of the times, the user's friends realize a lot faster that his account was compromised than himself.
That's because many compromised accounts are used to send spam or scam emails to everyone in their address books.
When receiving a message from a contact which the user is sure that person didn't send, he can report it by going to the "Mark as" menu and selecting the new "My friend's been hacked!" option.
The same can be done when flagging a contact's message as Junk. The confirmation dialog which asks if the sender should be removed from the contact list now features an "I think this person was hacked!" option.
Microsoft combines these reports with other information from its compromise detection engine in order to determine if the accounts have indeed been hijacked. In such cases the accounts are locked and their owners are forced to go through a recovery process.
"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," says Dick Craddock, group program manager for Hotmail.
The feature comes at a good time, as security companies recently reported a spike in the volume of spam sent from hijacked email accounts. According to Commtouch, as much as 30 per cent of all such spam comes from Hotmail accounts.
Another new feature introduced to lower the number of account hijacking incidents is a password strength check that no longer allows users to use common words as passwords.