REDMOND, WASHINGTON (BNO NEWS) — The popular web-based email service Hotmail appears to have been targeted in a phishing scam, details first emerged on Monday.

A list containing a total of 24,534 e-mail addresses and passwords were posted on the website pastebin.com on Sunday. Pastebin.com allows visitors to anonymously post texts or snippets of texts for public viewing.

A similar incident happened in late 2009, when some 20,000 e-mail accounts and passwords from Hotmail, Yahoo, AOL, Gmail and other service providers were posted to the same website. The new list appeared to have impacted more accounts.

Although most e-mail addresses on Sunday’s list were hotmail.com, also other service providers such as Yahoo.com, AOL.com, Gmail.com, and others were on the list. Most of the accounts were no longer accessible on Monday morning, which may have been done by Microsoft in order to protect the accounts.

A Microsoft spokeswoman was not immediately able to comment after a media inquiry on Monday.

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