Microsoft was forced to shut down its Hotmail service to fix a security hole discovered on Wednesday.
Microsoft was forced to shut down its Hotmail service to fix a security hole discovered on Wednesday.
The email service, which is used by some 50 million people, was offline from 8am to noon US time, leaving many US users unable to log on at the start of their working day.
Microsoft said that its best option for security reasons was to disable Hotmail for a limited period. The service is now back up and running, and Microsoft said it has put a fix on the servers.
The security hole enabled emails to be read, sent and deleted from Hotmail users' accounts by unauthorised outsiders. The glitch was triggered when a Hotmail user clicked on an attachment with an embedded Trojan Horse.
The attachment intercepted Hotmail.com's cookies and sent them to another PC with a key called MSPAUTH. Using this key an attacker could get access to a user's Hotmail account.
Microsoft was surprisingly slow to fix the security hole, the whole process taking its technicians around 20 hours.
See also:
Microsoft investigates yet another vulnerability
17 Sep 2001One user gets bombarded with 8000 copies of a single message.
13 Aug 2001Microsoft's Hotmail can be used as a tool for flooding and email bombing because of a weakness in the free email service that the software giant admits will not be fixed until tomorrow.
13 Nov 2000Microsoft will this autumn finally address the embarrassing fact that its Hotmail email service is not running on Windows servers.
09 Aug 2000Microsoft has been forced to completely redesign the technology behind its Hotmail free email service after a privacy flaw came to light.
15 Jul 2000Microsoft has confirmed that a flaw could leave its Internet Explorer (IE) browser wide open for hackers to steal 'cookies'.
16 May 2000A security hole has been discovered in Microsoft's HotMail service that enables outsiders to casually read private emails without a password.
11 May 2000Hotmail users had an unlikely hero to thank for restoring their service when it suffered a glitch on Christmas Eve - a Linux programmer and his credit card.
06 Jan 2000Five months after it was brought to Microsoft's attention, a serious flaw in Hotmail's virus scanner still leaks emails infected by the most pernicious macro viruses - including Melissa, Marker, Ethan, Story and Footer.
13 Oct 1999
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