Yahoo Hacked And How To Protect Your Passwords — forbes.com

Yahoo Yahoo yesterday announced that has been the focused of a co-ordinated hack and that at this time it has confirmed a number of users e-mail accounts have been compromised – you may be one of them (and if you are see below for my top tips on how to secure your passwords going forward). It is not clear how many users have been compromised, or exactly how. Yahoo don’t have a history of providing much information but it would be prudent for any Yahoo mail users to take precautions (more on that below). Between the vague statements about malicious code and “a third party was probably to blame” Yahoo has been resetting the credentials of affected users via e-mail and SMS SMS if your mobile is on file. Whilst details are scarce at this time this continues a trend of bad security and resilience news for Yahoo who experienced a multitude of issues in 2013. The company made clear in their announcement that a third party database with shared credentials was likely the source and that they had no evidence the usernames and passwords were taken directly form their systems. Whether the third party was one they provided data to, or whether it was a random third party with shared credentials is not particularly clear. There is insufficient detail to lay blame at this time, but certainly it would be prudent to take steps to secure yourself.

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