Massive number of Yahoo email accounts compromised | Hacker News Reader

Massive number of Yahoo email accounts compromised

18 pointstod22211 comments

Many complaints are showing up on Twitter [1] about compromised Yahoo! mail accounts. I received a propagation attempt email today from a friend with a Yahoo! account. The payload was a URL presumably pointing to a malicious web page.

Apparently there is another method to compromise an account besides the malicious web page, as people are reporting old, unused accounts being used to send the emails containing the malicious URLs.

An article today on the UK-based PC Pro site titled "One in ten emails from BT accounts is malicious" [2] discusses the current rash of account compromises on Yahoo! as Yahoo! is the provider for email services offered by BT to its customers.

This is not the first time Yahoo! mail has suffered a compromise recently. An article last January describes an ongoing campaign targeting Yahoo! mail accounts: "How Yahoo allowed hackers to hijack my neighbor's e-mail account (Updated)" [3]

Two articles appeared two weeks ago about Yahoo's email woes, one was: "Yahoo Mail reportedly loses key customer following mass hack attack". [4]

[1] https://twitter.com/search/?q=yahoo%20hacked

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897030

[3] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/how-yahoo-allowed-hackers-to-hijack-my-neighbors-e-mail-account/

[4] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/yahoo-mail-reportedly-loses-key-customer-following-mass-hack-attack/

New Zealands largest ISP uses Yahoo as their email provider and there were reports of this happening as early as February. They've been down playing it but I'm pretty sure that it much more wide spread than they're willing to let on.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/telecom-denies-resp...

http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/more-problems-telecoms-yahoo-xt...

I worked at Yahoo! during a fairly large compromise. There were about 2.1M accounts which were phished.

I think Yahoo!'s an easy target because 1) they have a lot of email users and 2) a lot of those users are older and/or more likely to be phished.

It was a nightmare to fix the compromised account and took a team about 3 months to complete.

I've gotten three of these in the last two days from three family members on different sides of the family who all use Yahoo. I thought the first two were just idiots, but after the third I started to wonder how widespread this was.

One of my accounts also got hacked sunday, with a sent message directly from the account (msg in sent folder) to all in adressbook. The initial breach showed the login from a country I haven't visited using a yahoo partner app. I only log in to my account with the browser. Never used a yahoo app...

So is it the accounts being compromised or has Yahoo! itself been compromised? Last week I received mail delivery failure notices for an email apparently sent to my entire address book. If it hadn't been for a couple of old addresses in my book I wouldn't have even known it'd happened.

I edited the item to add articles indicating that Yahoo! has had a history of problems with email compromises and now none of the links are clickable.

It's frustrating to have my attempt to cite sources trigger the anti-spam function.

I had a yahoo account that got jacked Sunday Night. I checked my computers for any sort of malware and didn't find any. It was a completely automated attack that sent one large email to all my contacts.

My aunt's account was compromised, and she even had two-factor authentication turned on. Yahoo says the login occurred form Latvia so I don't think it was on her computer that logged in.

My brother who has a yahoo email account suffered from this. He sent out a weird URL to his whole address book earlier today.

Maybe someone will finally read these 11,000 of unread spam emails at my throw away yahoo account.

Are these yahoo accounts with 2 factor authentication enabled?

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