Helping people with computers... one answer at a time.
I own a Hotmail account which someone hacked into. I managed to get back the password which they had changed, as they must have felt guilty and sent the new password to my brother on MSN Messenger. I went into my account which I hadn't been able to get on for months - turns out they have caused a lot of trouble for me - changed passwords for other websites which I can no longer access, sent out personal emails to family and friends. They also contacted my friends and family with vulgar and abusive language pretending it was me!
As you can imagine, I am very upset and angry, it has really got me down. I have a feeling I know who it is but cannot point my finger yet. I was told that if I contacted MSN support they could give me all of the IP numbers which signed onto my account at that particular time, and find out who it was. Is this possible?
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To be honest, I'm still fairly shocked at how often this question comes up. Apparently there's a lot of account hacking going on, though poor password management is actually more likely. Regardless of exactly how, accounts are hacked into, and havoc often results.
I'm not at all surprised that people want to track down the culprit.
Unfortunately, for most of us, I believe that the news is not good.
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Tracking down who logged into your account is highly unlikely. There are at least two huge issues at play here:
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MSN Hotmail may simply not keep that information. I mean, that's a lot of data that they would have to track, given the millions of subscribers and millions upon millions of logins that happen every day. From a purely practical point of view, I can't imagine them keeping that information, or if they do, keeping it for any length of time.
But, having said that, it's certainly possible that they do, so...
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They're not about to give that information to just anyone. In fact, I would be very concerned if they did give it if you simply asked. There are major privacy and security issues that result if they were to provide that information easily. There may even be possible legal liability issues for MSN if they responded to that type of request.
The third issue is simply that the IP address may not be enough to help you anyway. See the related articles below for more on why that might be.
So, ultimately, I believe that the information, if it exists at all, is just not available to "mere mortals" such as you and I. In fact, you and I want it to be difficult to get, simply to protect our own privacy in normal use.
I've said this before: if this type of information is available at all, I believe it would take law enforcement or a court order to get it. So, I suppose you could try pursuing with your local authorities, and if they find that there's legitimate reason to act on it, they probably can.
But my bottom line belief is that it's simply not practically available to us.
Your best action is simply to learn from this, and do what it takes to properly secure your account. Typically that means not sharing your password with anyone, and choosing difficult to guess passwords, and where appropriate, difficult to guess answers to your "secret question". In my opinion it also means not using free email accounts for anything sensitive or important.
Article C2626 - April 19, 2006 « »
Leo A. Notenboom has been playing with computers since he
was required to take a programming class in 1976. An 18 year career as a programmer at Microsoft soon followed.
After "retiring" in 2001, Leo started Ask Leo! in 2003 as a place for answers
to common computer and technical questions. More about Leo.
October 28, 2009 8:41 AM
Although Hotmail does not allow IP tracking, GMail does. At the bottom of the screen on a GMail account, the last 5 IP addresses from which the account was signed into, are listed.
February 18, 2010 1:55 PM
Bly sorry but i am not agree with you msn i guess save the ip address the they didn't show to us after a some surfing i have made a collect information about Logged in isuees of msn hotmail and now if anyone can think it is good then good for me
August 6, 2010 9:33 AM
My MSN chat was hacked into. 2 people were on my account at once, talking to my friend and I.
This site is obviously not safe or secure.
October 18, 2011 12:13 PM
One tip: If the hacker sent a message to a friend or family member, approach that recipient and ask to see it (just as it appears in their own e-mail inbox). Hotmail is one of the e-mail providers that still includes the X-originating IP number in each message header. Unless that's changed, the IP number there is the originating one. Of course, if it's really a random hack it's likely foreign (China or Russia), but if it's personal, it may be an IP the victim would be familiar with.
19-Oct-2011
January 14, 2012 10:43 PM
I have no idea how really but I happened upon this article as I was researching the top 10 email providers. And I just want to say that your sentence "But my bottom line belief is that it's simply not practically available to us.".
Is absolutely rubbish. Take a look at some of the other providers, like Google for example? Their email service gmail keeps track of the last account activity without any problems. Also take a look at Facebook, they also keep track of recent account activity. They used to only keep track of the 5 most recent activity but now they keep track of 10.
It is ignorant to say that its a lot of data to keep track of an therefor poor Microsoft can't handle it.
15-Jan-2012