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12 May 2000
Microsoft was forced to shut down its Hotmail service to fix a security hole discovered on Wednesday.
The email service, which is used by some 50 million people, was offline from 8am to noon US time, leaving many US users unable to log on at the start of their working day.
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Microsoft said that its best option for security reasons was to disable Hotmail for a limited period. The service is now back up and running, and Microsoft said it has put a fix on the servers.
The security hole enabled emails to be read, sent and deleted from Hotmail users' accounts by unauthorised outsiders. The glitch was triggered when a Hotmail user clicked on an attachment with an embedded Trojan Horse.
The attachment intercepted Hotmail.com's cookies and sent them to another PC with a key called MSPAUTH. Using this key an attacker could get access to a user's Hotmail account.
Microsoft was surprisingly slow to fix the security hole, the whole process taking its technicians around 20 hours.
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