10,000 Hotmail passwords posted online
An anonymous hacker has published the login and password details of 10,000 Hotmail accounts online, having obtained them via a phishing attack.
Microsoft insists that no internal systems have been compromised and the incident has been traced to a phony website setup to trick Hotmail users into entering their passwords.
Analysis by security research group Acunetix found the bulk of the passwords obtained by the phishing attack were very weak. Forty-two percent of those caught used passwords containing only lower case letters, while 19 percent contained only numbers. The most common password was 123456, followed by 123456789.
