This is a guest post by my good friend Narayan R (rnar(at)hotmail(.)com) who transformed himself from a victim of a hack to someone back in control of his Hotmail account. I am posting this for the benefit of those who may have gone through such an attack. Thank you Narayan.
Background: Narayan’s Hotmail account was hacked and those in his contact list received an email asking for financial assistance to extricate himself from a disaster overseas. Interestingly enough, the hacker included his brother’s correct name to lend more authenticity for the email.
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First, the hacker would have created a new password, so our existing password will not work – so please enter the Hotmail webpage and you will see a prompt for “not being able to access the account”
We click that prompt and there will be 3 options one of which asks whether you think someone is using your account – if you click that you then are given a link to reset your password
Thee are a series of steps given to reset your password, I also recollect if we are stuck somewhere in following these steps then you can access some link which asks whether you are unable to reset your password – if you press this then you are mailed a link to an alternate I’d which helps you to reset the password
But resetting alone will not do - after resetting and entering our account, we need to prevent the hacker from re-entering – for that you should delete all alternate ids which are shown in your profile (even if 1 or 2 are genuine ones it does not matter) and also reset the secret question and answer thereof
The above steps should hopefully ensure you are in safe re-possession of your account !
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