Yahoo Mail Hack: What really happened !

Yahoo has raised the alarm about a possible breach in users’ data and information although there is no indication that the hack is directed to the company’s servers. The Yahoo Mail users’ data might have been extracted through a third-party database system or services such as Facebook, Gmail or Netflix. All these services require a log-in from a user. A software is used to steal information that includes email addresses and the names of mail users coming from the “sent” emails.

Affected yahoo accounts have been notified about the breach and are being requested to reset their passwords which should consist of variations of characters and symbols and are not being used to other sites or services. Yahoo refuses to divulge the number of accounts affected pending a criminal investigation of the matter. A service outage also happened last December causing the mail service to be down for a number of days.

Yahoo offered an apology for that outage. Another sign-in verification process has been instituted after a password change to re-secure the accounts of those affected. The company admitted that a number of usernames and passwords had been stolen with the attackers using a database from a third-party in extracting the information. Yahoo has not revealed the name of that source.