Cyber Hijackers Target Hotmail Users

Hotmail users have been attacked by a group of Spanish email hijackers, who have managed to hack into millions of free accounts. The 'cyber hijackers', as they are now called, erased all email messages and contacts in several hotmail accounts, with the exception of a 'ransom' message — in Spanish — that demands an unspecified amount of money, in exchange of the lost information. Internet security firm, Websense, has warned all hotmail users of this new wave of 'cyber extortion', but has not published any solution to the problem yet.

The translated script reads, "If you want to know where your contacts and your emails are then pay us or if you prefer to lose everything then don't write soon!" Websense says the problem was identified when Hotmail Users' accounts were found hacked into, after they had accessed their Web mail accounts at a public Internet cafe in Mexico. The web security firm now expects the attack to spread quickly to English-speaking countries.

The hackers reportedly gained access to the email accounts by infecting Internet cafe computers with a keystroke logger, which allowed them to obtain the username and password of each person that logged in. This is the second case of 'ransomware' doing the rounds on the Internet, after May last year.

In the previous year's attack, the hacker first planted a Trojan horse on PCs and used the malware to encrypt a large number of documents and files. The criminal then sent emails to the victims demanding payment for the key that unlocked the encrypted files.

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