Hotmail allows you to Spot Compromised Friends

So you receive a spam message or fraudulent email from a friend of yours. Chances are it wasn’t your friend who sent it. Hotmail will now allow you to report instances where your friends' account may have been hacked.

“When you report that your friend’s account has been compromised, Hotmail takes that report and combines it with the other information from the compromise detection engine to determine if the account in question has in fact been hijacked. It turns out that the report that comes from you can be one of the strongest “signals” to the detection engine, since you may be the first to notice the compromise,” says to Microsoft’s Dick Craddock.

Two things will immediately happen once you click on My friend’s been hacked in the Mark as menu:

1. The account can no longer be used by the spammer
2. Your friend will be put through account recovery to allow him/her to take back control of the account.

Another measure that Microsoft will take to fend off hijackers is to prevent customers from using common passwords when they create new Hotmail accounts.