AskBillFirst – Non-Tech Speak Technology Blog

Have you noticed an increase in spam from those you know with yahoo, hotmail, aol or gmail accounts? There’s a reason for that. Apparently, there was a massive leak of Yahoo passwords and since many people use the same passwords for several sites, it was easy to hijack those accounts. From the link in this article, you can check if your email has been hijacked and is being used to send spam. Whether it is or isn’t, you should consider changing your password.  Also, take a look at the password list. Notice how many people are using simple, easy to guess passwords. Check out my post on creating strong passwords – Maybe My Password Isn’t As Strong As I Thought It Was

We recently heard that a massive leak of Yahoo passwords has been floating on the interwebs for a few days. According to Ars Technica, the dump is from Yahoo Voice and the data was released in clear-text yes, clear text in 2012. It seems they were not storing the passwords securely.We got access to the dump and we can confirm that this leak is valid. We can not however confirm it is from Yahoo, the password analysis does not have many “Yahoo’s” in it we’ll explain later.That said, we recommend all Yahoo users to change their passwords ASAP! Specially on other services that you are reusing the same passwords. Better safe than sorry.

*You can check here if your account was part of the leak: http://labs.sucuri.net/?yahooleak

via Analysis of Yahoo Voice Password Leak – 453,441 Passwords Exposed | Sucuri.

Filed under: PC Security |