Neowin reports that passwords of 20,000 hotmail, live and msn accounts have been compromised. It is unclear whether the passwords were obtained through a hack or phishing scheme. A list containing the account credentials was posted by an anonymous user on a public forum at pastebin.com.

It appears that currently only accounts starting with the letters A-B are affected, but other lists could exist.

I suggest that you change your password on your msn, hotmail or live account just to be safe.

Even if you have not fallen victim to a phishing scam yourself, it is good to know that the FBI is taken the threat seriously. Last Wednesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation pulled in the net on the largest cyber fraud phishing case to date, aptly named “Operation Phish Phry“.  The FBI case started back in 2007 and resulted in a multinational sting with almost 100 people being charged.

“The FBI said it uncovered a sophisticated phishing operation that was designed to swipe personal information and then use the data to defraud banks. On Wednesday, authorities arrested 33 of the 53 defendants named in an indictment. Egyptian authorities charged another 47 alleged cybercrooks.”

Each of the defendants indicted in the US, is charged with conspiracy to commit bank and wire fraud, with a statutory maximum penalty of 20 years in federal prison. Hopefully this case will result in convictions with stiff sentences, sending a strong signal to other aspiring cyber crooks.

Microsoft announced yesterday the availability of the public beta for Exchange Server 2010. The software, which is only released for 64-bit Windows is available for download here. The official product release is slated for the second half of 2009.

The key areas for improvements of this release seem to focus on productivity and cost savings, by providing:

• Capabilities to mix on-premise and hosted services, while maintain the same capabilities
• Storage performance improvements and resulting cost reduction
• New compliance capabilities through built-in archiving and expanded user roles management
• Improving user productivity and inbox management/experience

I found particularly interesting the introduction of so called MailTips that help prevent end-user faux-pas, such as reply-to-all or accidentally sending mail to unintended recipients outside the company.  I’m curious to see the actual implementation, since misguided user tips can quickly get annoying – remember clippy.

Voicemail preview is also very cool – I’ve been using Phonetag as an external voice mail transcription service for over a year now and would not want to miss it.

WindowsITPro published this more detailed article highlighting other notable improvements.

I have to admit I didn’t know that until yesterday, when one of my emails got rejected.  I’m sure it is buried somewhere in the FIOS services agreement, amongst all the other small print nobody ever reads.  But it’s true – Verizon scans every outbound email, as outlined here.

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As reported on TechCrunch last week.  The management team at Nielsen Media decided to control the abuse of Reply-To-All by simply removing this functionality entirely from the Microsoft Outlook email client.  In a memo sent by Nielsen CIO, Andrew Cawood, he explains that the measure will “eliminate bureaucracy and inefficiency”.

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Only a few months following the reply-to-all tidal wave bringing down the email infrastructure at the Department of Homeland Security, the US State Department experienced a massive self-inflicted assault on their mail servers last week as well.

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