billwill
Tuesday 13th October 2015 8:59pm [Edited]
North London
6,162 posts
Quote: keewik @ 13th October 2015, 6:07 PM BST
I've now had another 2 emails allegedly from Outlook and all exactly the same. All with gobbledygook addresses.
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What I'm curios about is how they get hold of my email address in the first place.
Hotmail (which became outlook) doesn't slow down the login process after say 5 failed passwords, so it is possible to construct a program which will try every possible password in turn for a guessed username in a feasible time. They try all words from a dictionary then bruteforce method try every combination of letters and digits in turn.
Eventually this technique (called a dictionary attack), will find the correct one of most common passwords and gain access to the account.
In your case above it looks as if they have not yet found your password, but have found or guessed your email address. They can send out millions of copies of that email above with 'dictionary search' usernames in front of the @outlook.com. You will never see the bounced ones and are surprised by the one that actually hit on a valid address.
As for how they got the email address in the first place, it may have been guessed as above or it may have been sold on a list by any 'marketing' website that you ever used.