User names and passwords of some Yahoo users have been stolen and their identities could be compromised.
Although Yahoo has about 273-million mail accounts, it is not known how many of them are affected by the latest security breach.
Jay Rossiter, senior vice-president: platforms and personalisation products, writes on the Yahoo blog: “Security attacks are unfortunately becoming a more regular occurrence. Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts.
“Upon discovery, we took immediate action to protect our users, prompting them to reset passwords on impacted accounts.
“Based on our current findings, the list of usernames and passwords that were used to execute the attack was likely collected from a third-party database compromise. We have no evidence that they were obtained directly from Yahoo’s systems. Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts.
“The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent emails.”
Rossiter says Yahoo is implementing a number of steps to help protect users.
“We are resetting passwords on impacted accounts and we are using second sign-in verification to allow users to re-secure their accounts.
“Impacted users will be prompted (if not, already) to change their password and may receive an email notification or an SMS text if they have added a mobile number to their account.
“We are working with federal law enforcement to find and prosecute the perpetrators responsible for this attack,” he says.
“We have implemented additional measures to block attacks against Yahoo’s systems.”
He also advices users to change their passwords regularly, using different variations of symbols and characters. In additoin, users should never use the same password on multiple sites or services, Rossiter warns, as this makes them vulnerable to these types of attacks.
