Hotmail gets a "My friend's been hacked!" feature

Microsoft has released a new feature to its Hotmail customers that is dubbed "My friend's been hacked!" The feature has a very simple purpose: if you begin receiving spam email messages from one of your known contacts, just head over to the "Mark as" menu and select "My friend's been hacked!" You can also report a possible account hacking by placing the message into the Junk folder. 

Hotmail will then take the note you sent in about a possible account being compromised and try to match the account up with Hotmail's detection system. If the system picks up that the account has in fact been compromised, the account is blocked from the spammer and the actual account holder will go through a process to regain access. 

Microsoft did note that this feature was released a few weeks ago, but now works with any email provider, not just Hotmail.