Hotmail introduces 2 new features: my friend is Account hacked and blacklist common passwords

Microsoft is really trying to improve Hotmail and of the introduction of new and unique features per day.

Microsoft recently introduced some new features and keyboard shortcuts for Hotmail:

Microsoft adds new features and shortcuts to Hotmail

And Microsoft introduced again today 2 excellent and very useful features in Hotmail which are as follows:

Lets you report account of a friend if compromisedPrevents you from using weak passwords

Here is what Dick Craddock of Windows Live team says about these new features:

Many e-mail accounts have weak passwords, making them easy targets for the hijackers. Even if someone's account gets hijacked, often discover their friends before they do, because the privateer their account is used for sending spam or phishing email to all their contacts.

These two comments led us to develop a number of new features that help protect your accounts. The first you can get a friend account as compromised – a feature unique to Hotmail-report and the second prevents you common passwords that are easy to hack your account.

"My friend was hacked" function:

You can in your friend's Hotmail account report as compromised. It's simple: when you this spam message supposedly from your friend, you just click "my friend has been hacked!" in the "mark as" menu:

Hotmail_Account_Been_Hacked_Option.png

You can also report an account as compromised when you mark a message as junk e-mail or else a message to the Junk folder move:

Hotmail_Account_Hacked_Option.png

When you report that your friend's account has been compromised, Hotmail takes that report and combines this with the other details of the compromise detection engine to determine if the account in question is in fact hijacked.

Once Hotmail marks the account as compromised, two things will occur:

First and foremost, the account can no longer be used by the spammer.When your friend is trying to get to their account, they are using an account recovery information flow which helps them to take back control of the account.

This features new works for each e-mail account. Other email offers such as Yahoo! and Gmail also able for the reports in their own systems will be to restore hacked accounts.

So now, in Hotmail, you can use any e-mail account as compromised, and Hotmail will compromise information to Yahoo! and Gmail.

"Prevention of the use of weak passwords" Feature:

Hotmail will now prevent users from using any of several common passwords. After a common password makes your account more vulnerable to attacks by brute force "dictionary", in which a malicious person trying to hijack your account simply by guessing passwords (using a short list of common passwords).

Common passwords are not only "password" or "123456" (although those frightening are common), but also words or phrases which happens to be shared by millions of people, such as "ilovecats" or "gogiants."

This new feature will roll out quickly, and will prevent you from a very common password when you sign up for an account or when you change your password.

So, you also use a weak password for your e-mail account?

If you select this, you might also be interesting for other similar articles in the following section: Windows Live.

Also check out our most popular articles list: popular articles.popular

If you want a complete list of all AskVG articles, take a look at our archive.

Enjoyed this article? Subscribe to our RSS feed or sign up for our free newsletter to all new AskVG articles directly in your Inbox.

Have some news or tip to share, please send us.


Read more