Posted by Alec on Fri, 15 Jan 2010, in Internet
Just yesterday I realised suddenly I couldn't login to my Hotmail account. No matter what I tried, even the password reminder, etc didn't work. It seems as if something happened and then I realised my eBay account is not working too. Normally I would use iPhone to login to My Ebay, and strangely when I logged in via IPhone, my eBay account username was shown as someone else. Immediately I knew my accounts have been hacked.
Not a suprise as both of my accounts were using very lite, six digit password, so I could not blame no one. Anyway, because I had my Credit Card information stored in my eBay account, the first and foremost thing to do was to restore my eBay account. Fortunately, eBay has a very good support team. To get your eBay account back, simply go to their Live Help page, and chat to a live agent. An agent will redirect you to their security team, who will need to further verify your details. They sometimes needed to call your phone to verify you. After that, you should get an email sent from them to reset your password. It would be wise to ask the support team to reset your username back too.
For Hotmail, it's a bit annoying as they don't have any live chat. But they do have a contact form, where you can contact them to restore password. However, the first reply you would get from them is an email asking you to try the password reminder. It was not any useful, so go on with their next option in the email, which contains a link to a form that lets you submit your Windows ID Validation request. This lets you answer some questions they need to verify if you are really the owner of the account, for example what are the subject lines in your mail box, who are some of the contacts in your list, etc. After submitting that, you should receive an email back from them with instructions to reset the password.
Hope this helps anyone!