As if facing a slump and struggling to revive itself isn’t an all-time low for Yahoo! Inc. was bad enough, more than 400,000 Yahoo user names and passwords were stolen and published by anonymous hackers today.
The intrusion was confirmed to have happened via “Yahoo Voices”, part of its news service. Voices is an online publishing tool (formerly known as “Associated Content”) which was acquired by Yahoo only two years ago.
Hackers later posted online (on a page that has been offline for a few hours now) what they say is login information for more than 450,000 Yahoo users and also added that it was meant to be a “warning”:
We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat. 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.
This breach puts other websites at risk as well, since they’ve exploited Yahoo’s vulnerability. Google, AOL, and Microsoft have since advised all affected users to reset passwords for their accounts i.e. Gmail, AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Live.com.
