Phising is inevitable in the high flying online word. None lives without a password and an email. Whatelse can provide a field day for the criminals. Aptly they are called cyber criminals. The worst scam so far has been unveiled in the Hotmail front.
The Times of India writes (10 October 2009)
In one of the biggest phising scams ever, the passwords of more than 10,000 Hotmail accounts were found to have been compromised and posted online.
The huge security breach was first reported by the website neowin.net, which said a list of the account details had been posted last week on pastebin.com, a forum used by software developers. This scam, as later reports suggested, may have compromised the privacy of at least 20,000 more accounts of users belonging to a number of other popular email providers such as Gmail, Yahoo and AOL.
According to security researcher Bogdan Calin of Acunetix, the hacked accounts show people still tend to go for weak passwords. The hack exposes the lazy and unsecure password habits of their users despite heightened security threats. Based on their analysis of the hacked passwords, rearchers have released a list of 10 most common passwords. Have a peep! 123456 tops the list of most common (and amongst the stupidest) passwords, Bogdan Calin told PCWorld. Calin reportedly got hold of the 10,000 stolen Windows Live Hotmail usernames and passwords that were posted on the Web site PasteBin late last week after which he analyzed and reached at the list.
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