How safe is your hotmail account

[bluedolphin]

How difficult would it be for someone to look in to your hotmail account (of course the wouldn't know your password)? Would it be easy peasy or quite difficult if they were determined?

[5029]

If it was someone close to you (eg partner) or someonw who knows loads about you it would be easy. The security you set on the account when setting it up was based on private questions eg birthdate and mothers maiden name. In theory anyone who know the answers to these could get in, change teh password and access the account. But you would know that it had been done as soon as you realised your old password no longer works.

Anyone any other ways someone could access the accounts?

[j2buttonsw]

Someone once told me your password was stored on the local PC as clear text: if you only knew where (it's in the registry). This probably only occurs if you select the keep me signed in. There are also Hotmail crackers available to download off of warez sites which is worrying. I consider email to be like normal mail: if someone wants to read the contents they can always open the packet.

[mikewith]

Hotmail is probably the holy grail for certaain hackerz, given its ubiquity and the fact that Bill Gates owns it.... but they have yet to succeed. I'm fairly sure that Microsoft treat protecting Hotmail as one of their very top priorities. (Having said that... who bothered to read the terms & conditions when they signed up for Hotmail? Bet Microsoft themselves have the technology to check your mail, whether or not they actually do...)

[darth vader]

Without knowing your password then the only way into your account is to find out your password. Of course how difficult it is to find your password depends on a)whether you keep it secure or not (i.e. on a post-it note stuck to the monitor) b)whether or not you use the standard well known ones like "password" "god" or your partner's name c) whether it's easy to spot in a packet of information being transmitted.(therefore the safest password is a string of "random" digits e.g. fiow9jg90t9gh8g8UQIR*&�"JFHW*(FU - but then you'd have trouble remembering a string like that!)

Yes the username and password are transmitted as clear text, so bearing in mind point c) above, it is important to make sure packets are not intercepted by rogue software such as viruses which are sometimes written to do this - always have an uptodate antivirus software installed

No the passwords are not stored locally on your machine as clear text (assuming your operating system is a windows O/S) and are encrypted (if you can find the location in the registry of where they are stored you will find they are encrypted, binary values).

All emails are stored (and transmitted) as clear (ascii) text - they have to be to keep a common standard between heterogeneous systems/networks. So yes it is possible for Microsoft to read your mail. In fact most ISP's do (not literally - they have software which reads your mail) - not because they are nosey, but because they are checking for a)viruses and possibly b)profanity/pornography/illegal content (hence more often than not your email arriving with a disclaimer at the bottom - sorry can't comment specifically on hotmail as i don't use it).

hope all this helps you and a few other questions thrown up here. Darth

[wizard]

Probably one of the most simple ways for someone to access your hotmail acount would be if your running MSN Messenger. All the "hacker" needs to do is click on the link reading "no new e-mail" or whatevr and this gives them direct access to your inbox. Another way it can be done is called adding. This means that if you log into another Messenger program e.g. Trillian, the program will need to store your passwrod as a way of easy acess to the link to your inbox. By this i mean that (too put it quite simply) the link will (in the bakground) go to the hotmail site and using your user name and password stored in the program, it can send it to the hotmail, looking like your actually signing in. The password can then be seen when you click on the window the program has opened, it will have a value string of: [something]=pass?PASSWORD This isnt meant to be used as a "hack", its used so that you can sign in without all the hassle but other messenger programs dont have the facility encrypt the information you need to sign in when sending it to the hotmail site. Sorry for any complication!!