Online security seems to be a joke these days. The government gets hacked, the websites get hacked, Facebook is spamming up folks pages from hacks. What’s going on? The latest security breach that was set to shut down users Internet capability on Monday was bad enough, but now comes another one hitting the free e-mail and Internet provider sites.
Yahoo! had to send out an alert Thursday that a security breach involving the theft of over 400,000 users’ passwords may have spilled over to other popular e-mail providers like Gmail, AOL, and Hotmail, according to the New York Times. The report states:
“A group of hackers, known as the D33D Company, posted online the user names and passwords for what appeared to be 453,492 accounts belonging to Yahoo, and also Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, Comcast, MSN, SBC Global, Verizon, BellSouth and Live.com users.”
Yeah…pretty hairy stuff when you think about how many times you’ve used your password and what those passwords can access. But, the group said that this was a warning to show how easy the hacking can be done:
“We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat.”
Among the data discovered was “106,000 Gmail e-mail addresses, 55,000 Hotmail e-mail addresses and 25,000 AOL e-mail addresses.” Those were not hacked, but the people “used their e-mail address as user names for a Yahoo service.”
Read more here, but go check for new spam and suspicious behavior on your Yahoo! account first!
-J.C. Brooks
July 13th, 2012 at 8:58 am
LOOKS SAFER TO JUST STAY OFF THE INTERNET . SOME JUST HAVE TOO MUCH TIME ON THEIR HANDS.
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