[Berlin, GERMANY] The German freemail provider GMX is still being plagued by problems.
Only last Friday, the mail accounts of 118,000 customers were erased
following changes made to the mail server. Yesterday, the provider became a
victim to a hacker attack, in which the passwords of 1,625 customers were
manipulated and the mail accounts disclosed. The company today explained
that they immediately gave the concerned mail boxes a random password in
order to make them inaccessible to others.
The hacker had sent GMX users an HTML mail message with the subject “think about
it!.” On opening the message, a script became activated on a foreign server
which altered the password, and gave the hacker free access to the personal
mail of the users. Since then GMX technicians have closed this security gap.
The GMX AG is one of the biggest e-mail and messaging services in the German
Internet, with over five million members.