Yahoo email addresses targeted in fraud attack

Yahoo Mail is the latest victim of an online hacking attempt. Here's what to do if your account is compromised.

Yahoo has confirmed usernames and passwords for its Yahoo Mail email service may have been accessed by fraudsters.

The details are likely to have been collected from a third-party database which has been compromised.  

Yahoo said users with an affected account will have been contacted and had their passwords reset.

Security risk

The exact number of affected accounts has not been revealed by Yahoo, but it has said it’s working with law enforcement to find out who is responsible.

In this attack the criminals were seeking to find names and emails addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent emails.

The company says malicious computer software is to blame for security leak.

A statement on its Tumblr page from Jay Rossiter, senior vice president at Yahoo, said: “We have no evidence that they were obtained directly from Yahoo’s systems. Our ongoing investigation shows that malicious computer software used the list of usernames and passwords to access Yahoo Mail accounts.”

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Password fraud

Accounts which may have been at risk will now have a new password and users will need to go through an extra security check when logging on.

If your account is at risk, you should have been contacted with a prompt to change your password, either through an email or a text message. Yahoo said it's also introduced additional measures to block these kinds of attacks.

Back in December personal data was stolen from Yahoo and posted online. Data from Facebook, Google and LinkedIn was also taken, posing a huge threat to the security of customer accounts.

Making your account more secure

One of the major problems with online safety is that people use the same password for multiple accounts. If a criminal has access to your password, they may then be able to log onto a range of your other accounts.

To safeguard your account from being hacked, there are several things you can do. Choosing a password which is hard to guess is a good start, but remember not to make it so complicated that you’ll forget it.

Signing out of public computers after using your email, checking your login activity regularly and avoiding opening dodgy links or suspicious emails will also reduce the risk of handing your accounts over to criminals.

Read How to protect your PINs and passwords

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