Passport and Wallet users are going to be disappointed to learn that these feature-rich tools can't be used until MS fixes a little bug which makes sport of taking over someone else's account.

Passport authenticates a user for access to his credit cards and Web site accounts and passwords, to make life easy for on-line merchants and shoppers, and hackers and identity thieves.

The flaw was discovered by Seattle researcher Marc Slemko, who devised a Hotmail exploit which enables an attacker to use a malicious e-mail to obtain the victim's entire on-line shopping kit, and take any action the owner can take.

Briefly, the exploit involves stealing session cookies used to authenticate users to the Passport server and other sites which support Passport, and impersonating the victim.

"If, for example, a user enters their password to sign in to Hotmail, they are then allowed access to their Passport Wallet without further authentication for the next 15 minutes! So if someone logs into Hotmail then reads an e-mail sent to them that uses one of a variety of attacks to steal their Passport cookies, that attacker has then effectively stolen that user's Passport Wallet, without the user ever knowing," Slemko explains.

Step-by-step instructions for doing just that are laid out on Slemko's Web site here. It is definitely not as difficult as it should be. ®