The following is a reproduction of a letter I received recently from
Symantec. I have taken out the tech talk and reproduced it in a way
you may understand.

Hackers have recently found a vulnerability in the hotmail system, and
have found a way to access any hotmail account that has a password
less than six characters long.

With this information, they have been using random hotmail accounts to
sent out phoney emails to everyone in your hotmail address book,
trying to lure them into known internet spam sites.

Whilst Microsoft, Hotmail, Symantec and McAffee's are all working to
rectify the problem, there are some simple steps you can take to
protect yourself.

First of all, change your password. preferably to something with the
following criteria:

* Ensure that it is at LEAST six characters long (ie: my password)

* Mix up your password with a combination of Capital and lower
case letters (ie: My PassWord)

* Add in Numbers at random places (ie: My P4assW0rd5)

* Add in Ascii Characters (!@#$%^&*()-+{}[]:;"',./\|~`) (ie:
My~P4assWord5!)

* The longer it is, and the more variety of Capital Letters, Lower
Case Letters, Numbers and Ascii Characters you can add in, the better
the password!

* As always, make it something you are likely to remember, but
would be hard for others to guess


Second, check your outbox regularly for messages you haven't sent.

Finally, don't click on any link that you are not sure about.

Next is the tricky, technical bit:

This mainly applies to Microsoft and Internet Explorer users:

If someone asks you in an email to click on a link to do something
(like to check out a site), if you are not 200% positive where the
link leads, right click in the link, copy the web address and paste
this into a search engine. If it is a fraud, Google, Yahoo, AltaVista
, Ask and some other search engines have lists of the latest
fraudulent web addresses. At the very least, it will give you
information about the page you are trying to go to!

Do not use GoMamma or most Meta search engines, as these have been
compromised in the past!

If anyone wishes to rewrite the above two paragraphs in a manner that
is easier to explain, feel free.

That's the long and short of it! Hope this helps!