Yahoo has said data from more than one billion accounts may have been hacked.
But should you be worried - and what can you do to protect yourself in the future?
[...] Security expert and writer Brian Krebs said in a blog, "For years I have been urging friends and family to migrate off of Yahoo email, mainly because the company appeared to fall far behind its peers in blocking spam and other email-based attacks."
Yahoo has reassured its users: "We continuously enhance our safeguards and systems that detect and prevent unauthorised access to user account."
Some may not think of themselves as Yahoo users but the firm provides some BT and Sky customers' email accounts [in the UK].
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Yahoo Hack: Many UK Internet Accounts Are Also Really Yahoo Users
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(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Ethanol-fueled on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:50AM
Yahoo has been in the process of being dismantled from the inside, [nbcnews.com] by the Jew girlfriend of one of Google's Jew founders.
To trust the Jew is to have trust in your own destruction.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Frosty Piss on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:04AM
Moron.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:51AM
Analingual assmuncher!
(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Sunday December 18 2016, @12:30PM
He's in my don't-read filters, but I just had to click to see what post you were responding to with such a pithy reply.
Yeah, I think you nailed it.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 3, Informative) by daver!west!fmc on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:48AM
...just about anyone getting Internet and e-mail service from any of the companies making up AT&T is getting it from Yahoo. sbcglobal.net, att.net, bellsouth.net, swbell.net, some pacbell.net customers. I've wondered who Yahoo's other hosted mail customers are.
Back in 2012 there was something going round that got lots of 'em. The basic exploit was a web site that looked like a news page about someone finding success working from home, but did some cross-site scripting with some other Yahoo property (i.e. not Yahoo's webmail) to capture the Yahoo session cookie and post it to some other server where the session cookie was collected for use. So a link to this site would get spammed to Yahoo mailboxes, some of 'em would click on it, and then their mailboxes and contacts were available to the spammer who would use the Yahoo account to send links to similar pages to the clicker's correspondents.
The spammers have mined the relationships, I now (years later) get spam e-mails nominally from a couple Yahoo-using friends but from other e-mail addresses.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by anubi on Sunday December 18 2016, @09:38AM
I had SBC dialup many years ago. I ended up leaving them for Localnet when SBC and Yahoo got in bed together and from all appearances of their business emails to me, were insisting I must use a Yahoo interface to access the web through SBC.
From what I understood, I could not use the Netscape I was using at the time. They wanted me to use their proprietary portal software. I was afraid they were fixing to net-nanny me and not let me visit sites like +Fravia was running. I was already a big-time fan of +Fravia and +ORC at the time, as I was having fits making stuff work together.
Microsoft and other software publishers had already taught me the perils of running proprietary software, and how businesses - when they want to show their rude side - will have a machine do the deed of telling their customer "NO", usually by way of having no option available or simply failing to respond - the technology-based equivalent of hanging up the phone on the customer - or simply walking away in the middle of a conversation. People were supposed to accept it if a computer did it.
At the time, I was determined to build software infrastructures that worked - no matter what.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:30PM
What's this "+" you are doing?
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:52PM
+Fravia and +ORC are two of the big people in the reverse engineering scene. The '+' signifies that they are members of the +HCU: one of the best reverse engineers on the planet.
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Monday December 19 2016, @08:31AM
Someone wrote in Wikipedia:
Fravia was a professor at the High Cracking University (+HCU), founded by Old Red Cracker (+ORC), a legendary figure in reverse engineering, to conduct research into Reverse Code Engineering.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fravia [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @06:49AM
I stopped getting any spam many years ago, because I stopped sending email to people. If you stop sending, eventually you stop receiving! It's magic!!
Who the hell uses email anymore anyway?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @07:06AM
Go work for a 'large' company. They live breath and eat email. I think it is all they do.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @08:18AM
If only that was true. I've never once used my Comcast email address or given it out to anybody, but it's littered with thousands of spam emails. I think Comcast themselves sold me out. I would be really pissed if I actually ever used it for anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @05:17PM
Same with my ISP email. I was required to create it and did so with a 20 character keyboard mash plus a long word at the end (like skjfsdaofurp938ur9upoAbsentmindedness, and they print it on my bill, so I don't have to remember it for the few instances I have to use it). However, that thing is chalk full of spam. My ISP either sold a list of customers sometime or got hacked; however, they claim that neither of those are the case. The spammers definitely didn't land on that valid address via brute force and I doubt they would waste an exploit on my Chromebook just to get addresses for spamming.
(Score: 1) by anubi on Friday December 23 2016, @07:51AM
I have the same problem with "private" email boxes I establish and try to keep under wraps.
I suspect javascript embedded in ads were the culprit.
As far as I am concerned, Javascript is far too powerful. This kinda thing is like handing out invisibility cloaks to spammers.
"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday December 18 2016, @12:46PM
Who the hell uses email anymore anyway?
I am an "old people" you insensitive clod!
--
Sent from Slashdot using my super powers!
(Score: 2) by butthurt on Tuesday December 20 2016, @03:16PM
I stopped getting any spam many years ago, because I stopped sending email to people. If you stop sending, eventually you stop receiving! It's magic!!
That could happen. Other possibilities are that your e-mail provider has implemented a quota and spam caused your account to reach its quota, or that your provider implemented a spam folder and you haven't noticed the messages going into it.