Yahoo email account passwords stolen

March 11, 2022

NEW YORK (AP) — Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo’s
email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information
about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with,
the company said Thursday.
Yahoo didn’t say how many accounts have
been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide,
after Google’s Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are
273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the
U.S.
It’s the latest in a string of security breaches that have
allowed hackers to nab personal information using software that analysts
say is ever more sophisticated. Up to 70 million customers of Target
stores had their personal information and credit and debit card numbers
compromised late last year, and Neiman Marcus was the victim of a
similar breach in December.
"It’s an old trend, but it’s much more
exaggerated now because the programs the bad guys use are much more
sophisticated now," says Avivah Litan, a security analyst at the
technology research firm Gartner. "We’re clearly under attack."
Yahoo
Inc. said in a blog post on its breach that "The information sought in
the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected
accounts’ most recent sent emails."
That could mean hackers were
looking for additional email addresses to send spam or scam messages. By
grabbing real names from those sent folders, hackers could try to make
bogus messages appear more legitimate to recipients.
"It’s much
more likely that I’d click on something from you if we email all the
time," says Richard Mogull, analyst and CEO of Securois, a security
research and advisory firm.
The bigger danger: access to email
accounts could lead to more serious breaches involving banking and
shopping sites. That’s because many people reuse passwords across many
sites, and also because many sites use email to reset passwords. Hackers
could try logging in to such a site with the Yahoo email address, for
instance, and ask that a password reminder be sent by email.
Litan
said hackers appear to be "trying to collect as much information as
they can on people. Putting all this stuff together makes it easier to
steal somebody’s identity."
Yahoo said the usernames and passwords weren’t collected from its own systems, but from a third-party
database.
Because
so many people use the same passwords across multiple sites, it’s
possible hackers broke in to some service that lets people use email
addresses as their usernames. The hackers could have grabbed passwords
stored at that service, filtered out the accounts with Yahoo addresses
and used that information to log in to Yahoo’s mail systems, said
Johannes Ullrich, dean of research at the SANS Institute, a group
devoted to security research and education.
The breach is the
second mishap for Yahoo’s mail service in two months. In December, the
service suffered a multi-day outage that prompted Yahoo CEO Marissa
Mayer to issue an apology.
Yahoo said it is resetting passwords on
affected accounts and has "implemented additional measures" to block
further attacks. The company would not comment beyond the information in
its blog post. It said it is working with federal law enforcement.
___
Online:
Yahoo blog post:
http://yahoo.tumblr.com/post/75083532312/important-security-update-for-yahoo-mail-users

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