Yahoo Voice hacked, 450,000 passwords leaked/posted

Do you use Yahoo Voice? If so, you’ll be happy to know that your login info – both email and password – could have been one of the 450,000 accounts that got hacked and posted online this morning. Yahoooooo!….. No, that’s not a good thing. It’s time to change your password.

The latest data breach show’n’tell was brought to you by the hackers at D33D Company. Not as a threat, however—as a wake-up call. The goal was to point out how lax Yahoo is with securing its webservers. The hackers say the damage of posting account info is nothing compared to the damage others have caused by exploiting Yahoo’s security over the years.

Mission accomplished?

The statement given from the hackers concludes saying they didn’t post the exploits they used in the hack so that others wouldn’t cause more damage. As it is now, the site all of this info was posted to keeps overloading, but when it’s up it is emails and passwords being shown. Yahoo has responded saying “that less than 5% of the breached Yahoo accounts had valid passwords.” Does that make it better?

At least this breach was done to prove a point, not to steal your identity—but that doesn’t make it any better. I’m sure other cyber criminals have jumped on this opportunity to snag the info for themselves.

Gone are the days of a few dozen accounts being hacked in a breach. Cyber criminals today go big or go home. That’s how they roll. It was only a month ago that 6.5 million LinkedIn accounts got exposed. Yahoo’s 450,000 total may pale in comparison to that, but that doesn’t make it a small fry.

Too many companies wait for a breach before securing themselves. Why? Are they lazy? Despite all of the reports of breaches, do they think “oh, it will never happen to us”? Maybe it’s not even innocence. Maybe the lack of security is deliberate. Times are tough, budgets are shrinking, IT staff have to do more with less. Why fork out money for security if nothing has happened before?

It’s that kind of thinking that leads to breaches like this. Reactive versus proactive. What will cleaning up this mess cost Yahoo?

Don’t wait for a breach to hit you. Protect yourself. And if you’re a Yahoo Voice user, go change your password. Now!