500 Million Yahoo Accounts Compromised

In a public statement on the company’s official Tumblr page; the Sunnyvale, California company confirmed user account information was stolen from the network in 2014. Yahoo is advising users to update their accounts now. The process is quick and easy; the network has simplified the process to update your information. Just head on over to the sign in page, log in with your existing email address and password.

You will be asked to secure your account, click the button Yes, secure my account button.

Enter your new password then confirm it.

That’s it! Just as a precaution, you might want to update or change your credentials if you use your Yahoo! account to sign into services. I was using my Yahoo address to sign into Facebook, so I made sure to update it. Years of failed leadership and lack of a strategy to compete with Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft has destroyed the company to the point that most of its assets are being sold to Verizon for a mere 5 billion…. that is unless Verizon pulls out based on this latest breach. Honestly, this data breach is likely to be the final nail in the coffin for this once great Internet Corp. What do you think? Will you be moving your account to a new service? Would love to hear your thoughts about Yahoo! and this latest data breach in the comments below. Still… why did it take two months for Yahoo and Verizon to notify their customers. For me, that’s unacceptable. Granted, I’m sure the time was spent on damage control and working with attorneys to figure out liability and how best to go public. Still… two/three months is not OK. CHANGE YOUR YAHOO ACCOUNT password 2 YEARS AGO! And DO NOT use the same password for a mix of account types If you must use the same password for multiple accounts- Then Keep your banking and money management accounts separate all others Have special accounts and passwords for browsing, Keep them separate from your main email. And keep your main email account separate from the rest of your social interaction accounts. And – for good passwords – have a phrase you can remember – and use letters from that as you will not be writing that phrase down, or telling any one what it is, you can write down clues to yourself – as in start at character, select every ‘n’ th character and how many characteers to use Make that more complex by having a usual set of characters you include in most of those passwords – that set including at least 1 capital, 1 numeric and 5 lowercase so – maybe every password includes “Clo3t” and ends with some characters from “I8Yahoodotheyannoyu2.” You could also use some characters from the date – but remember ‘scans’ will look for short and full month and year entries. The basic technique is to have a means of remembering set of passwords that you can change. And – considering the time taken for the problem to be made public, keep some separation of your activities logons I wrote an article a few years back here on gP yet it’s still relevant. Will perhaps update and republish here on the site. https://www.groovypost.com/howto/create-easy-remember-secure-strong-password-phrase/ So someone noting you type in your system logon password, and then your email password will not get access to your bank account using those passwords. And – if hackers get 1 services logon and password, that will not be the same, or even very similar to your other ones – especially those accessing your money – or even other’s money – You’ll get the blame if it’s your id used to clear out the nursery school petty cash for snacks account – whatever. Re logon list – Well, I have a list for my logons – it goes along the lines of: 11,3,5 Current 12,3,6 Savings 16,2,5 ISA 2,1,5 forums 1,2,5 email 1,2,4 ISP Note the separation of Forum’s and email characters from the money access ones – So if someone gets the forum values – they do not get the banking ones And – the browsing etc. are via my ISP account so I have to enter them for all online access So they are definitely NOT extending into the money password characters. Email accounts – if you have many for anti-spam, or spam source identification purposes, passwords can be just another character on the end – as in 1,2,5,8 Similarly for forums where there is no money or personal details available – just your ability to post messages. Remembering others may get the list, but it is really just as a reminder to you, and to use it the phrase is needed! – as is the meaning of any extra entries you use – such as – in the above, 8 could be 8th in the phrase, the number 8, or the 8th letter of the alphabet (English A-Z or Greek, etc.) or a 2 number code for the character (row and across) on the keyboard. It’s up to you to work out a meaning for the clues to you that you write down. And remember – you may, at any time, need to change the passwords for your access – such as if your bank, or YAHOO admit their system has been hacked! And you do NOT want to have to change the password for all your online access. You should also consider – for passwords and for backup – Your system, and all the backups may be stolen – or your home destroyed – so keep a record somewhere you should be able to get them back from – certainly, you’ll probably need a password to get at any online (Cloud) backups. So – read through the thread posted by Steve, and, yes – it is addressed in another thread, – but… When creating backups – you need to consider what disaster you would be recovering from! Comment Name * Email *

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