Your questions: Beware the Ides of March, and Hotmail account hacks

"Beware the Ides of March"

Not actually said by Caesar (in Julius Caesar Act 1, scene 2) but to Caesar by a soothsayer in the crowd. And though often noted at the beginning of the month, the Ides are the fifteenth of the month.

Whatever the case, today I was asked…

"So, what customer issues has the Ides of March brought us?"

I’ll let you know in a couple of weeks when they arrive. 😉

But seriously, I thought as I was finishing the last of my lunch and prepping for a meeting to look over a couple of new and existing issues, what about the issues I get in my mailbox daily? I’ve covered a number of them in my blog. Perhaps I should take an effort to cover these more broadly to customers reading this blog. We have lots of ways that issues come into our large company – through email, phone calls, escalations, Twitter and even my blog (you’d be surprised at the number of people who find me and many other employees at Microsoft to help with customer issues).

Microsoftie by day, frustrated artist by night spending far too much time after the kids are off to bed on social media and the Internet hunting down customer issues, probing for new and developing problems that may just blossom into another DST. (More to head it off than anything else.)

I thought that I should take on a more direct challenge. Especially given the number of customer emails I received before the weekend with product questions.

So, with that, I start on a new project on this blog, to cover at least one customer and partner challenge or issue per day here, in every one of our various product groups, for the next year. Rain, sleet or snow, I will cover an issue that either comes into my mailbox or that I see of interest that pops up on one of our forums (like Microsoft Answers). Some issues may not be solved in a single day or with a single post, but we can hope. And with I-don’t-know-how-many total product groups we have (the numbers have hovered in the mid three digits), I’ll have plenty of material…

I’ll find out just how many in support products we have today, starting with the product list on the Microsoft Lifecycle support Information site. So far, I’ve come up with one thousand, five hundred and sixty-eight applications, products, technologies and service offerings listed there, from .NET Framework 1.0 to Zoo Tycoon: Marine Mania… 121 different posted Office listings, to just under 200 listings with things under "Windows".

Tonite, I’ll start with Hotmail. Here’s the first issue:

Mike emailed me, saying he and his little brother’s my email accounts had been hacked

hello sir,

i dont know if i am correct here, but both emails of me and my little brother seems to be hacked i keep getting:

The Windows Live ID is incorrect. Please try again.

when i try to recover to my new email address :/

both accounts, i checked the computer and there was a trojan on it so seems somebody gained access and did something with our accounts, hope you can help me

regards and thanks

Mike

Through the benefits of the good people we have in our support group, we have a help site that looks at the most common issues with Hotmail and possible solutions on The new Windows Live Solution Center, http://windowslivehelp.com. It combines the expertise of the Windows Live Hotmail support team, the knowledge and helpfulness of our Hotmail customers, and articles and tips that help make Windows Live Hotmail work for you.

Back to Mike. For his issue related to a hacked (I don’t mean "hacked" as in "upset", as we said in Canada, but compromised, not to be confused with the curling hack) account specifically this Recent reports of Account hijacks…

In addition, to ensure the security of your Hotmail account, we highly recommend that you change your Hotmail password and Secret Question. To do this, please follow the steps below:

To change your Hotmail password, click here.

To change your Secret Question, click here.

For specific questions, you can browse all our communities (where users can initiate a discussion thread or join an existing one) or visit our solution categories (where we post Microsoft Certified Solutions). Other customers and our support agents will work with you to provide the correct solution.

For tips on how to navigate the Windows Live Solution Center, click here.

If all of the above fails, ask a question. There are several ways to submit a question in the forum: