Microsoft has said that it would ban Hotmail users from having or selecting very common passwords for their email accounts.
The company said that it would introduce a new feature which will identify and ask users who have very common passwords such as 123456 to change their weak passwords to stronger ones, according to The Telegraph.
Microsoft’s group program manager for Hotmail Dick Craddock said, "This new feature will be rolling out soon, and will prevent you from choosing a very common password when you sign up for an account or when you change your password."
"If you’re already using a common password, you may, at some point in the future, be asked to change it to a stronger password."
The company also said that it would introduce another feature that would allow an user to report hack attacks on friends’ accounts.
Users could flag a message as "My friend’s been hacked!" to report the matter to Hotmail’s security systems, said the company.
To make its fight against spam more effective the company would share the alerts with Google and Yahoo, if spam is believed to have been sent form those services.
The company said that it has already restored thousands of accounts for users after they had been reported hacked.
"We’ve had this feature turned on for only a few weeks, and we’ve already identified thousands of customers who have had their accounts hacked and helped those customers reclaim their account," said Craddock.
