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Yahoo email servers hacked

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Carol Haynes:
Had a deluge of calls from customers today panicking about spam sent from their email account to everyone in their address book.

The common factor was that the email service was provided by the UK telecom BT, which in turn uses Yahoo mail for its none business customers. All of them had their accounts accessed from Yahoo! Mobile in various parts of the world (S. Korea, Vietnam, Netherlands, El Salavdor and more) over the weekend so it looks like either Yahoo's account, email or mobile services have been compromised.

In their usual style BT are claiming it is customers not providing good passwords or leaving them lying around (though how someone in Korea could guess both an email address and the corresponding password in the UK beats me) and Yahoo are conspicuous by their silence on the subject.

Hunting round the internet I found this article:

http://resources.avg.com.au/emerging_threats/warning-80000-yahoo-xtra-email-accounts-hacked/

seems it has now spread to other areas.

If you have a Yahoo email account (or a Yahoo powered account from a partner) check you login history via this link:

https://api.login.yahoo.com/login/history

using your normal email account details.

As a precaution you might want to change your password as a matter of urgency !!!

RambleI have always found Yahoo's mail servers to be particularly irksome, only rivalled by the amount of crap and irritation delivered by Hotmail.

I use BT myself and gave up with the email address years ago as I had spam in it before I even logged in on day 1.

Yahoo's spam filter is total rubbish letting loads of spam through and blocking loads of genuine mail. If sensibly you use POP to access you account the default setting block all perceived spam so you don't even see you mis-classified genuine mail - and most customers don't know how to fix that.

Every iteration of their awful webmail system just seems to get worse and worse, even to the point of needing ActiveX controls in IE to attach files.

If you use Yahoo I would thoroughly recommend setting up your own email address and give yourself control over it. The advantages are portability, not having to use bug ridden and security flawed systems and control. OK you will probably have to pay for a domain name and some hosting but it doesn't cost a lot and is a hell of a lot more predictable and flexible!

kyrathaba:
though how someone in Korea could guess both an email address and the corresponding password in the UK beats me)
--- End quote ---

Easy...

[email protected]
password: careforaspotoftea

 :D

Tinman57:
  I can't figure out why anyone would use a yahoo or hotmail account anyway, unless they just wanted a throw-away account for some reason.  I've never seen an ISP that didn't already give you anywhere from 5 to 15 email addresses with the internet service.  All you have to do is log on to your account and set up your email address(s).  Then you can use your own spam filters or anti-spam software.  I use MailWasher Pro to wash all the crap from my email account BEFORE I download my emails from my POP3 server.  But, that's just me....

IainB:
@Carol Haynes: Thanks for the heads-up. Why am I not surprised?
The NZ Telecom/Yahoo accounts were hacked a couple of days ago. I have had a proprietary NZ Telcom ISP email address for years - one that I rarely need to use. When NZ Telecom tried to get everyone to migrate their email accounts to Yahoo, I could see that probably nothing but trouble was likely to come of it, so I kept my original email account and avoided the Yahoo one. (Fortunately for me, it appears.)
Since then it has become evident that Yahoo's so-called "service" is a euphemism, and I am glad I kept out of it. This latest hack just seems to be par for the course.

Carol Haynes:
  I can't figure out why anyone would use a yahoo or hotmail account anyway, unless they just wanted a throw-away account for some reason.  I've never seen an ISP that didn't already give you anywhere from 5 to 15 email addresses with the internet service.  All you have to do is log on to your account and set up your email address(s).  Then you can use your own spam filters or anti-spam software.  I use MailWasher Pro to wash all the crap from my email account BEFORE I download my emails from my POP3 server.  But, that's just me....
-Tinman57 (March 04, 2013, 08:06 PM)
--- End quote ---

Simple a number of ISPs farm out their email to Yahoo to deal with. BT (the largest telco in the UK) does this for domestic customers. The email address is [email protected] or similar (there are variations on the domain) but at the end of the day it is a yahoo account.

Its exactly the same as organisations contracting their email to Google - a friend of mine has a school email address, she goes to the school website to login to webmail and although there is some customisation of the colour scheme and layout you can see instantly that it is a gmail account.

It's only going to get worse as consumers are pushed to cloud services - hell if you buy a Windows 8 machine most people seem to think that HAVE to sign up for a Windows Live (aka hotmail) account and have their machine permanently linked to Microsoft's servers.

What is really worrying with all these systems is the increase in successful hacking - I you use something like hotmail as your account for Windows 8 and end up syncing personal stuff to the cloud and hacking on that server won't just allow the spread of spam but also the theft of personal information. Savvy computer users can easily avoid this but the vast majority of people have absolutely no clue what is going on!

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