What if your user name and password were posted online for everyone to see? Well, it just happened to thousands of people. Web mail accounts everywhere have been compromised. What happened? How can you avoid it?

How these accounts were compromised isn’t entirely clear. At first, experts believe it was the result of a phishing scam. Users were somehow tricked into giving up their user names and passwords. But the large numbers caused some to suspect malware like keyloggers.

Web mail providers have locked many of the affected accounts. Users will have to reset their passwords before being allowed back in. This may include additional steps like validating their identity.

This is time-consuming. Check this form for reclaiming a Hotmail account. Did you have plans this weekend? And sadly, each breach could have been avoided.

I don’t know whether account holders were victimized by phishing or keyloggers. But no one has to be affected by either.

Keyloggers are malware programs that record every keystroke you make. The keylogger sends logs back to the criminals. From that, they can figure out your log-in credentials.