[Janisum]

A friend was using my computer while staying here and would occasionally have trouble signing into my Windows and not sure about my hotmail. He told me he'd get messages pop up while incorrectly trying to log in.

The next day I got a message claiming to be from Microsoft. It said I needed to send them my credentials because of several attempts of someone trying to log into my acct.. Please understand, I know better than to answer anything asking for my password. But.. this time I somehow felt it was legit because I checked the IP and it gave me a microsoft account. And I knew about the troubles of my friend logging in. So. I answered the questions, thus, giving away my user name and password.

It haunted me all night so I got up and had a chat with Microsoft. The rep. advised me to call the 800/888 numbers to a different microsoft agent. I never did call them because I changed my password and secret questions. But now I'm wondering how someone knew about the problems logging in to my acct.. What would that be a sign of or what don't I have for protection. Or could this actually have been someone from Microsoft?

I have Microsoft security essentials installed and keep it updated as well as windows. I have Malawarebytes installed and Microsoft security essentals firewall. I keep my system cleaned and use CCleaner almost daily.

I have Win/7 running I.E 9 and use Windows Live hotmail for the most part. Can anyone help me understand what happened and should I contact Microsoft?

Yea.. it was dumb of me to reply to the message and even though the IP address came from Microsoft, I still should have known better.

Any comments are welcome and appreciated. But I don't need reminded of my stupidity

Thanks.....

[coastie65]

Hi. Everything sounds as if it was working right. When you ran the IP and it came back to Microsoft, then you were in good shape. In short, I wouldn't worry about it. I have had messages supposedly from Microsoft that came back to some place else. They got reported. You were smart in running the IP before replying.