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Originally Posted by ganthc
Interesting. I was curious when Iggy's friend said that MS had acknowledged that there have been issues with what his friend was experiencing. I think it's funny that people think the Live accounts are somehow hack proof. Considering how hackers have thwarted other types of supposedly hack proof things, I am not too surprised if they have found a way to do so. Considering that credit card numbers are attached to many of these accounts, it certainly makes for a strong target.
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Again, phishing or "social engineering," whatever you want to call it, is how 99% of today's attacks are done. The reason why is because its 1000x easier to fool someone into giving you their information than it is to actually hack an account - which would be near impossible with a decent password.
I think most have the false idea of scary hackers busting open their accounts from watching movies like "Hackers" where the main characters just pull up a terminal and start breaking into people's accounts through secret methods - that is pure fiction and is a fruitless endendeavor. Real hacking of a single account could take weeks or months, and by the time you got the password not only would you have gotten caught by your millions of failed attempts, but you probably could have easily captured 100 accounts in the same time by phishing/social engineering techniques - bulk send emails with fake websites that look like the real deal. To have someone actually hack these days without essentially having the user voluntarily give up their information is very, very rare.