Hotmail a security risk?  As some of you may know at BlogNet Awards, we encourage people to not register with a hotmail address for the reason that many people do not get mail because of the spam filters.  We found another reason for people to be watchful of using hotmail addresses.

I recieved an email this morning from Live Journal about using hotmail addresses.

In part this is what it said:

“…….   The recent break-ins resulted from hijackers finding and accessing lapsed Hotmail accounts that were used with LiveJournal accounts and publicly displayed on Profile pages in the past. You should be aware that Hotmail recycles email addresses that haven’t been used in more than a year. If you validated a Hotmail address for your journal and displayed it publicly in the past, but then let the address lapse, someone who finds and re-registers that address can use it to obtain control of the journal.”

Many people use hotmail addresses for a variety of reasons, personally I use them for a lot of the newspaper websites etc.  For any kind of business or even certain styles of business related work I use only gmail as I find it more convenient, easy to use and has fantastic features… but the one thing I also learned was that if you use a hotmail account as a secondary account with you gmail account, you are still VULNERABLE!

What is the answer to this hotmail breach?
1. Remember to keep your hotmail address active every once in a while.  From everything I could find out, do this at least every few months

2. Set up two gmail accounts, one as a primary account and create a secondary account.

3.  Keep your passwords safe – do not share with anyone.  In fact that best way to use your passwords is to not use the  same password ( or username for that matter) for every program/log-in that you own.

If you dont think this a serious problem then you can see what happened to one fellow -    copperbadge’s entries under the tag “picking up the pieces“  Some of his language is to be forgiven as you can see and feel his frustrations.

Here is my question to all my readers? How do you keep your email addresses safe?