Questions about anti-hacking

[digital_ninja2k]

My wife and I have just gotten through an episode with this girl my wife knows through association only. Through livejournal the girl got my wife's email address and managed to hack her hotmail account.

This was about a week ago, I finally managed to recover her accounts just two days ago and today when she gets online she tells me she has three password change requests in her alternate email.

Now, I have two questions.

1.) Is there any way to protect a hotmail.com account from being hacked and if so how would you go about it?

2.) Are other free email clients more secure, ie: Yahoo, email.com, gmail, etc. Or are all of them fairly the same?

 

[office politics]

http://housecall.trendmicro.com - free online virus & spyware scans

run on all machines your wife uses to access hotmail. my guess is that this girl has installed a keylogger on a machine your wife uses to access hotmail and steals her passwords that way.

There's two other possibilties but are unlikely. Your wife didnt logoff a hotmail session and the girl hops on after your wife without having to authenicate; this can be avoided by clicking the use advanced security link under the user//pass prompt on the login page. The other way is that the girl brute forced or guessed the password. Hotmail has protection in place to prevent brute force attacks. You can prevent the girl from guessing the password by using a complex password.


all the email providers you suggest prolly have a similar level of security.

 

[Avalanch3]

easiest way is...dont log onto hotmail from public computers...and go to change password in your hotmail account and use lots of numbers insted of letters...for example...password...p455w0rd....it becomes that little bit harder for people to guess

 

[digital_ninja2k]

Thanks guys

Thanks for the replies everyone. What you guys have said confirms my theory, I thought it was most likely a keylogger.

Anyway, one this same topic, does Ad-aware detect keyloggers? If not is there a free keylogger detector and remover and how good is it?

Again, thanks for all the help everyone.

 

[office politics]

spybot has a keylogger catagory in its definitions

 

[baronvongogo]

Could also have been an obvious password some passwords have a question if you forget your pass such as its my dogs name. Then they can take random guesses until they crack it. Personally I use a alphanumerical password always best to be safe

 

[Yin-Yang]

hey guys speeking of Spywear,

my friend has two sons and he wants to make sure they are not going online to look up "mature content" so he was thinking of installing a keylogger on both of there computers so he could keep track on them.
so his question is is there a place he can get a personal key logger to place on there computers? or possably a way to Check previousely veiwed websites?

oh by the way his sons are always deleting internet cookies, and temp internet files.

 

[brady]

Change the kids accounts to limited through the control panel. Then password protect an administrative account. You can set the internet security features to block "Mature" content.

 

[Osiris]

how do you know it was hacked?

 

[digital_ninja2k]

We know it was hacked because not only did the girl get into her email accounts, but she got into her livejournal and an RPG site my wife and I use and deleted EVERYTHING and then used my wifes livejournal to brag about it.

My wife got lucky and recovered her main email account and was able to regain everything. Since then she's been on a strict regimine of changing her password at set intervals using the advice you all provided.

Thanks alot for all the help guys.