5 years ago... Hotmail continues to suffer security scares

23.09.99: Microsoft's free email service, Hotmail, is still struggling with security gremlins that caused a systems' breach at the end of August.

The software giant is investigating a glitch that allows a bogus password entry screen to be opened by sending a JavaScript code; this screen could then allow a user to collect other usernames and passwords.

The news follows claims made at the start of September by Paul Cronin, head of penetration testing at network security specialist, CenturyCom, that the Hotmail network was shut down in August for two hours because of a hacker attack.

23.09.04: The popularity of Hotmail has been its undoing in many respects. It was one of the first major victims of dictionary-attack spam tactics which exercise as many possible combinations of words and letters @hotmail.com.

Such attacks subsequently became popular against any large multi-user domains.

Demand and continued attacks against such a large target have also resulted in problems for customers accessing the service and the competition from services such as Yahoo! is also being added to by the considerable pull of Google's Gmail service - which has raised the bar in terms of free storage.

Hotmail is yet to show signs of following suit to the same degree, but continues to be universally popular and provide quality free-email service - accepting that 'free' always equates with some draw-backs over paid for services. MSN has also made huge in-roads into controlling the amount of spam users get in their Hotmail accounts.