-We've all received annoying spam e-mail messages like this: Buy Viagra now for 99 cents.
[unk] watches, [unk].
Have a great date.
But when it's your e-mail account spamming people, it can be more than an annoyance.
-My Hotmail account was inundated with friends of mine that I just hadn't talked to in a long time, saying, are you really stuck in Europe?
Are you in need of money?
-Drew [unk] 8-year old Hotmail account
was hacked 4 months ago and has served as an online wakeup call.
-It was kind of a nice update almost of web security to say, hey, you need to diversify your passwords a little bit, diversify your usernames.
-While every e-mail account is vulnerable to hacking regardless of service provider, experts say, Hotmail and AOL are particularly vulnerable.
-These two are giants.
AOL is one of the oldest webmail providers and Hotmail is one of the biggest, with over 360 million users.
And that's a lot of targets.
-Besides completely
closing your compromised account, here are some other solutions.
-Notifying your webmail provider that you think there's been a problem.
Use a help form, use a contact form.
It's as easy as that.
Another good precaution is changing your password, maybe making it something that's more secure.
-But [unk] cautions with e-mail getting hacked is often not a matter of if, but rather when.
-I kind of anticipated more and more these days with just how open the internet is.
-A good time to take stock of your online footprint.
In San Francisco, I'm Kara Tsuboi,
CNET.com for CBS News.
