Yahoo email account passwords stolen

February 8, 2014

Yahoo Inc. broadcasted that usernames and passwords of its email customers have stolen and used to gather personal information for those Yahoo mail users who have recently corresponded with. The company didn’t say how many accounts have been affected.

Danger: access to email accounts could lead to more serious breaches involving banking and shopping sites. This is because many people reuse passwords across many sites, and also because many sites use email to reset passwords.
The company believes that the usernames and passwords weren’t collected from its own systems, but from a third-party database. It’s not clear why a third-party database would have information on Yahoo accounts.
Yahoo is resetting passwords on affected accounts and has “implemented additional measures” to block further attacks.

Note: As per the research firm comScore, Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google’s Gmail. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the US.

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