[English readers: you can find English links in this post for your convenience]

Prendo spunto dal post di Emanuele Colli su MClips “Windows Live Hotmail: tutte le novità” per sottolineare e riportarvi le diverse nuove funzionalità previste sul tema Sicurezza da questa nuova versione di Windows Live Hotmail:

Enhanced security

  • Microsoft SmartScreen. SmartScreen helps distinguish between legitimate e-mail messages and spam based on Internet protocol reputations, user reporting, third-party sources, semantics, botnet detection, signature recognition and more.
  • Individual Preference Auto-Learning. In some cases, what’s junk mail to one person is legitimate mail to someone else. So we’ve invested in learning about that on the fly based on the individual.
  • Junk Mail Descriptors. The new Hotmail tags junk mail so that when you find a message in your junk mail folder, you know how it ended up there and can subsequently take action to keep it from happening to similar messages in the future.
  • Spammer Infrastructure Detection. By going beyond just filtering spam, the new Hotmail has features to help combat spammer infrastructure head-on, which can make sending spam more difficult, and helps cut down on spam.
  • Time Traveling Filters. Through the new Hotmail, we’re fine-tuning our ability to retroactively remove spam while detecting the signatures of a new spam effort.
  • Trusted Senders. Trusted Senders is a feature that will visually demarcate (e.g., a padlock or shield icon) e-mails in inboxes from specific senders that it recognizes as legitimate, helping you easily tell the good from the scams. We put a small safety logo next to messages from Trusted Senders.

Help protect your account

  • Single-Use Code. This new security feature is designed to further protect you when you sign in on public computers, such as in Internet cafes, airports and coffee shops. By using a Single-Use Code, you won’t have to type your password into a public computer, thereby helping to prevent it from being stolen by key-loggers and the like.
  • Full Session SSL. In addition to providing secure sockets layer (SSL) encryption at login for all accounts, the new Hotmail will soon support the option to maintain SSL encryption between you and our servers during your entire Hotmail session.
  • Trusted Senders. With the new Hotmail, we’ve gone the extra mile to visually identify trusted senders in your inbox, particularly banks and the like, which are commonly used for phishing scams. Features such as DomainKeys Identified Mail and Sender ID further strengthen these security measures, adding considerably to the protection of your account.
  • Account Proofs. The new Hotmail encourages you to increase the security of your account by adding what we call Proofs — personal information you can associate with your Hotmail account. Proofs can help you recover access to and control over an account that someone has taken from you, which is a risk confronting all public Web mail services since hijacking scams aren’t technology-dependent.

Personalmente apprezzo molto la novità degli Account Proofs, che permetteranno di irrobustire di fatto il controllo del proprio account e il suo recupero nel caso di furto di identità/credenziali: legare l’account di hotmail al proprio PC o ricevere la nuova password sul proprio cellulare, sono un modo per aggiungere una sorta di secondo fattore di autenticazione, legando l’account e la sua password (che possono essere rubati) a qualcosa che dovrebbe essere con buona probabilità in nostro possesso (PC e cellulare), alla pari di quello che avviene con le smart card o le chiavette one-time-passwords.

Le novità non finiscono qui e ovviamente non si esauriscono in quelle di sicurezza: sto leggendo in lungo e in largo commenti davvero entusiastici anche per le funzionalità in ambito social networking e di integrazione con i cloud services.

Feliciano

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