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Yahoo confirms 450,000 user account information stolen by hackers
by Joseph Earnest July 13, 2012
Newscast Media SAN FRANCISCO—In a statement issued by Yahoo, the company confirmed that on Wednesday July 11, a previously-unknown hacker group broke into a database for one its services and stole the account information of around 450,000 users. The company said it is fixing the vulnerability that led to the theft, changing passwords of affected users and notifying the companies whose user accounts may have been compromised. However, it did not reveal the exact number of the compromised accounts or identify those other companies affected.
Late Wednesday, a hacking group known as D33Ds Company posted 453,492 account credentials in plain text on a public website, claiming that it did so as a "wake-up call" rather than a threat to Yahoo.
"There have been many security holes exploited in web servers belonging to Yahoo! Inc. that have caused far greater damage than our disclosure. Please do not take them lightly," said the group at the end of the post.
The top five passwords in the stolen batch were "123456," "password," "welcome," "ninja" and "abc123," said David Harley, senior research fellow at security firm ESET, which specializes in antivirus, spyware and malware protection.
In a statement, Yahoo said, "We apologize to affected users," the company said in an email statement. "We encourage users to change their passwords on a regular basis and also familiarize themselves with our online safety tips at security.yahoo.com."
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