Yahoo Passwords Hacked

[easysurfer]

"If you have ever contributed or signed up to contribute to Yahoo Voices or Associated Content, it’s well worth changing that password — and changing your passwords and usernames for any other account with the same log-in information."


Yahoo passwords hacked, likely taken through Yahoo Voices - The Washington Post

I read in another article that someone who had a 31 character password was on the hacked password list. So much for passwords that can't be taken. Especially when it's only stored as a text file .

[steelyman]

Thanks very much for posting! According to NYT, it extends to a number of widely-used services:

Yahoo Breach Extends Beyond Yahoo to Gmail, Hotmail, AOL Users - NYTimes.com

They mention Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth, Live. com

[Sarah in SC]

This reminds me to mention a good practice when you stop using an old email account...I just went through a few that my DH and I no longer use and deleted all of the contacts.

That way even if the account is compromised, the dang spammers can't access the contact list to send spam out to all your peeps. I have no idea if this actually works in practice, but it was simple enough to do, along with deleting the old mail out of those boxes. Now that I use 2 step verification at Gmail, I feel a lot better about the security.

[Lsbcal]

Happened to see the same news story, changed my (strong) password "just in case".

[walkinwood]

My Yahoo! mail password was hacked a few months ago, and while looking into it, I found a number of complaints about hacked Y! mail passwords. Yahoo! seems to have lost its way.

I now use LastPass (free) which allows me to generate a unique password for each site and then remembers it for me. I only memorize my financial site passwords.

[braumeister]

For several years now, I've been using 1Password. It lets me generate secure passwords any time, and remembers the username and password I've used for any website. It also does a lot more, but those are the big things for me.

The nice thing about this software is that it works on pretty much any computer platform or smartphone, and relieves me from the need to remember anything except my 1Password password.

[W2R]

Wow.

I don't really have anything even slightly private in my Yahoo email account, but I would imagine that some people are freaking out right now.

[steelyman]

I have several subaccounts through my AT&T email, which I believe is managed by Yahoo!. One has been sporadically kicking back passwords since this morning. If it's still occurring tomorrow, I will change all. I called AT&T this afternoon, and all they could say is that they could reset passwords.

I have never signed up for the services mentioned in the articles.

I hope they come down hard on Yahoo! and the hackers.

[obgyn65]

Yes. I changed my yahoo password this morning. You never know.