It is speculated that Hotmail had either suffered a breach or due to aggressive phishing attack, the information had been collected and posted online by duping people into giving out the information. However, the company denied that its web based e-mail service has been hacked and the information stolen due to some lapse on its part.

Information and details of around 10,000 email accounts, mostly from Europe, were found online on a code sharing site pastebin.com. Details of around 10,028 names beginning with alpabets A and B were found on the site, which includes microsoft email accounts ending in hotmail.com, msn.com and live.com

It is believed that an investigation has been launched and hotmail users are recommended to change their hotmail passwords, noting that around 40 per cent of people use the same passwords for many other wesites, they use. A spokesperson from Microsoft said that they have initiated their standard process of working to help the customers regain control of their accounts.

Dave Jevans, the chairman of the Anti Phishing Working Group (APWG) said that they had seen 50,000 to 75,000 compromised accounts when phishers target an ISP with millions of users.

Hotmail has around 400 million registered users, although the company did not spell out the exact number of active users out of the lot. Jevans further added that if the accounts for A-B are extrapolated to the full alphabet, its possible that over 1,00,000 accounts were compromised. In that case this would be one of the biggest single phishing events and it could be the result of a long period of time, months and months of harvesting. Lastly he urged the users to change their passwords as soon as possible.