Hotmail accounts get compromised!!

I received an email on a list and wanted to warn people:
[ad]

Dear friend,
i would like to introduce a good company who trades mainly in electornic products. Now the company is under sales promotion, all the products are sold nearly at its cost. They provide the best service to customers,they provide you with original products of good quality,and what is more,the price is a surprising happiness to you! It is realy a good chance for shopping.just grasp the opportunity,Now or never!
The web address: http://www.nekcn.com

Seems this is being sent from Hotmail accounts. There are a number of ways someone could be getting a hold of your email address. According to Microsoft forums this seems to delete your email contacts and also send out this in the same time. This seems to be a new spam campaign for this one company. I would guess someone bought advertising from this company and the advertiser is doing some really unmoral things.

There are several ways someone hotmail account could be sending out these emails. It could be a [intlink id=”2650″ type=”post”]phishing attempt like they did with Twitte[/intlink]r. They could of done a dictionary attack on each account to find the password, that I why [intlink id=”2646″ type=”post”]I suggest having a password generator[/intlink]. It could of been a virus, and if that is the case you would need to [intlink id=”2205″ type=”page”]check your system out for the virus[/intlink]. I would guess it is the first two, because I am unsure of if you can have pop3 account or not. I don’t use Hotmail but people seem to be using it.

If you recieve this email, I’d email the account responsible to let them know that they have sent this.  I would also like to know if it was a virus or how they account got compromised.   Remember only you can prevent from getting a virus, nothing else works better than yourself.