There has been a marked increase in the amount of spam e-mails being sent from Yahoo, Gmail, and Hotmail accounts, according to analysts at Websense Security Labs.

Websense said on Thursday that personalized spam e-mails had been sent from the compromised accounts to all of each user's contacts. The e-mails contain links to fake shopping sites, intended to capture sensitive information from the reader.

Last week, Microsoft acknowledged that 30,000 Hotmail accounts had breached, and suggested the passwords for the accounts had been obtained in a phishing scam.

However, some security experts believe that the password breach cannot be attributed to phishing. Amichai Shulman, chief technology officer for security firm Imperva, told ZDNet UK on Friday that the information was likely to have been obtained through key logging.

Full story: c|net