Yahoo email account hacking

[Don Arnold]

Anyone else fall victim lately to their yahoo email account being hacked? Perhaps it is just me, but it seems like an epidemic. I have/share 3 yahoo accounts (1 for my business, 1 personal, and an older one that my wife and I used). Two of these accounts have been hacked within the last month or so. I've received two or three emails from other yahoo users who have obviously had their accounts hacked as well.

For those techies out there, is Yahoo particularly vulnerable, or are hackers catching up with their hacking tools?

It's very frustrating when this happens to you....twice! I did make my new passwords more secure (and I'm the first to admit that neither password would pass current password security meters).

[ronmac]

This has been going on for about a year. I've seen it happen to about 20 colleagues and friends over the last six months. In fact, just yesterday it happened.

I cannot believe this hasn't made national news yet.

[Scott Bails]

Happened to me a couple months ago.

Thankfully, my Yahoo account is only used for spam.

[Shadow]

I've been getting emails from my wife at hotmail that she is not sending.

[Camelogue]

Yes it happened to me and associates too at different times.

[Scott Bails]

I've been getting emails from my wife at hotmail that she is not sending.

I've been getting those from her, too. Should I respond to them?

[Shadow]

I've been getting those from her, too. Should I respond to them?

If you think you need to lose weight, be my guest.

[rapidfirerob]

Yahoo email? No thank you.

[Adrian]

I got an e-mail from my Yahoo address that I didn't send a month or so ago. I don't really care, since, like Scott, I only use my Yahoo account as a spam receptacle.

[Vic2012]

I've been using Yahoo mail over ten years. Been hacked twice in the last couple years. Now I don't don't keep important contacts in my address book. Not worth the hassle or embarrassment.

[Shadow]

I only had Yahoo for the football pick-em league and Dimeadozen doesn't recognize Verizon.

[roddenberry]

I have a hotmail account I mostly use for websites requiring e-mails for contests and stuff, and I use it also when I setup a computer to test the e-mail configs. I've had it forever. I mostly get spam from Epson and food products on it. It never got hacked though.

[Trane]

MMMhhh!!!... this morning, I was a bit amazed to see three draft messages saved , that I'd never typed before... It looks like I was hacked, but nothing sent either... first time since 2002 (when I opened my account)

Never use hotmail >> always found inadequacies or interface prioblems with yahoo mail

I find yahoo pretty good on detecting spams, though... either it never gets to my box... and when they do, they find themselves immediartely sent to the spam folder...

[VickiLynn]

This happened to me 3-4 weeks ago. I haven't really used my Yahoo email for a few years, so maybe I just need to change over a few newsletter subscriptions I want to keep and close the whole thing down.

[ronmac]

Some don't seem to be too bothered, because they don't really use their accounts. However, their friends are getting attacked by those hackings. So, I'd suggest just killing the account.

[Trane]

Mmmhhh!!!... Yahoo asked me to change the password two weeks ago after some hacking and I must say that it's totally fine since...

[Rune Blackwings]

i was hacked and the hacker cleaned out all the spam...

[sonic]

Yahoo!'s email system hacked by criminal spammers

Yahoo!'s email system has been hacked by criminals who have hijacked users' accounts for a global spam email campaign.

The FBI has moved to shut down the operation after a Channel 4 News investigation revealed accounts around the world had been broken into. We understand the hacker lives in the Russian Federation.

Yahoo!, the world's third largest email provider, was hacked in January and claimed it had fixed the problem. But this new vulnerability has raised fresh concerns about security at the internet giant.

[sonic]

Yahoo Hacked: What to Do When Your Account Security Has Been Breached

1. Change the answers to your security questions, password, and the whole nine yards.

2. Never, and I mean never, add your phone number to the account. Many content and mail providers are trying to get everyone to enter this information to make it easier on them when an account has been breached or the user forgot their pass word. Before keying in your digits, ask yourself if you really want these jerks to have your phone number.

3. Never, and I mean never, use your real birth date when opening an account. I don’t care if it’s a violation of the terms and services, DO NOT DO IT!

4. Never, and I mean never, use the same security questions and answers on multiple accounts, be they e-mail or other accounts that you maintain online. Once a thief has this information, who knows what kind of chaos they will reap.

5. Lie on the answers to your secret questions. Face it; your digital footprint is easily traced. It’s not that hard for someone to figure out what elementary school, college, or high school you attended (thank you Classmates.com, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc).

6. Do not use a password that is sequential or alphabetical. ABC123 is not being clever. It’s being dumb.

7. Do not use a password of “Password.” Again, you’re not being clever. You’re being dumb.

8. Do not use a password that is easily found elsewhere. For example, your birth date, your graduation date, your kids birthday, names of your family, or even your dog’s name. If you’re on a social networking site and post, “Poochie-woochie had a very bad day to day. It’s so hard training a puppy,” and Poochie is your dog’s name, you may have given someone the in they were looking for.

Following these simple steps will throw the support reps off if you have multiple accounts. Once you answer the questions, the Yahoo! rep will grant a reset and, boom, you’re back in your digital email life.

Once an exhaustive password search begins,
the most important factor is password length!

[ronmac]

the most important factor is password length!

That's what she said.

[Greg]

Once an exhaustive password search begins,
the most important factor is password length!

Well, not much to be said for 'aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa' as a password, but it's reasonably long.

Unfortunately, there are many systems that still prevent you from using a password over 10 or 20 characters (which I think is ridiculous, these days).

More important than simple length is to combine letters, spaces, numbers and as many special characters as the system permits (like '~!@#$%^&*') to increase the level of difficulty a brute force attack would take.

Using only letters, and less than 10, your passwords can be cracked in a matter of minutes. For a 4-char password, pretty much 1 second is all that is needed.

The closer your passwords are to actual dictionary words, the more efficient the attack will be.

The number of permutations required to crack a password of 10 characters using a random mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and special characters, can edge close to 91,000 years.

So, keep this in mind when deciding on banking passwords.

[ronmac]

I use 1234.