4 ms·

Massive number of Yahoo email accounts compromised

18 points by tod222 13y ago

Many complaints are showing up on Twitter [1] about compromised Yahoo! mail accounts. I received a propagation attempt email today from a friend with a Yahoo! account. The payload was a URL presumably pointing to a malicious web page. Apparently there is another method to compromise an account besides the malicious web page, as people are reporting old, unused accounts being used to send the emails containing the malicious URLs. An article today on the UK-based PC Pro site titled "One in ten emails from BT accounts is malicious" [2] discusses the current rash of account compromises on Yahoo! as Yahoo! is the provider for email services offered by BT to its customers. This is not the first time Yahoo! mail has suffered a compromise recently. An article last January describes an ongoing campaign targeting Yahoo! mail accounts: "How Yahoo allowed hackers to hijack my neighbor's e-mail account (Updated)" [3] Two articles appeared two weeks ago about Yahoo's email woes, one was: "Yahoo Mail reportedly loses key customer following mass hack attack". [4] [1] https://twitter.com/search/?q=yahoo%20hacked [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5897030 [3] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/01/how-yahoo-allowed-hackers-to-hijack-my-neighbors-e-mail-account/ [4] http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/yahoo-mail-reportedly-loses-key-customer-following-mass-hack-attack/

404error 13y ago
My brother who has a yahoo email account suffered from this. He sent out a weird URL to his whole address book earlier today.
RoyceFullerton 13y ago
I've gotten three of these in the last two days from three family members on different sides of the family who all use Yahoo. I thought the first two were just idiots, but after the third I started to wonder how widespread this was.
tod222 13y ago
I edited the item to add articles indicating that Yahoo! has had a history of problems with email compromises and now none of the links are clickable. It's frustrating to have my attempt to cite sources trigger the anti-spam function.
NZ_Matt 13y ago
New Zealands largest ISP uses Yahoo as their email provider and there were reports of this happening as early as February. They've been down playing it but I'm pretty sure that it much more wide spread than they're willing to let on. http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/telecom-denies-responsibility-for-malware-attack http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/telecom-denies-resp... http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/more-problems-telecoms-yahoo-xtra-email-ck-138416 http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/more-problems-telecoms-yahoo-xt...
- p3d4nt 13y ago
  Meh. Who uses yahoo mail as their main? Nobodies. I don't really know other than I don't get many emails from person@yahoo. I've got a yahoo account (or an aussie Y7) its for spam and pipes (pipes are cool). I've also got a huge file full of yahoo mail hashes... people's password choices can be embarrassing~!
jmathai 13y ago
I worked at Yahoo! during a fairly large compromise. There were about 2.1M accounts which were phished. I think Yahoo!'s an easy target because 1) they have a lot of email users and 2) a lot of those users are older and/or more likely to be phished. It was a nightmare to fix the compromised account and took a team about 3 months to complete.
taylodl 13y ago
So is it the accounts being compromised or has Yahoo! itself been compromised? Last week I received mail delivery failure notices for an email apparently sent to my entire address book. If it hadn't been for a couple of old addresses in my book I wouldn't have even known it'd happened.
ropman76 13y ago
I had a yahoo account that got jacked Sunday Night. I checked my computers for any sort of malware and didn't find any. It was a completely automated attack that sent one large email to all my contacts.
litmus 13y ago
One of my accounts also got hacked sunday, with a sent message directly from the account (msg in sent folder) to all in adressbook. The initial breach showed the login from a country I haven't visited using a yahoo partner app. I only log in to my account with the browser. Never used a yahoo app...
jyu 13y ago
Are these yahoo accounts with 2 factor authentication enabled?
kjohnston 13y ago
My aunt's account was compromised, and she even had two-factor authentication turned on. Yahoo says the login occurred form Latvia so I don't think it was on her computer that logged in.
gesman 13y ago
Maybe someone will finally read these 11,000 of unread spam emails at my throw away yahoo account.

18 points by tod222 13y ago

404error 13y ago

My brother who has a yahoo email account suffered from this. He sent out a weird URL to his whole address book earlier today.

RoyceFullerton 13y ago

I've gotten three of these in the last two days from three family members on different sides of the family who all use Yahoo. I thought the first two were just idiots, but after the third I started to wonder how widespread this was.

tod222 13y ago

I edited the item to add articles indicating that Yahoo! has had a history of problems with email compromises and now none of the links are clickable. It's frustrating to have my attempt to cite sources trigger the anti-spam function.

NZ_Matt 13y ago

New Zealands largest ISP uses Yahoo as their email provider and there were reports of this happening as early as February. They've been down playing it but I'm pretty sure that it much more wide spread than they're willing to let on. http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/telecom-denies-responsibility-for-malware-attack http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/news/telecom-denies-resp... http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/more-problems-telecoms-yahoo-xtra-email-ck-138416 http://www.nbr.co.nz/article/more-problems-telecoms-yahoo-xt...

p3d4nt 13y ago
Meh. Who uses yahoo mail as their main? Nobodies. I don't really know other than I don't get many emails from person@yahoo. I've got a yahoo account (or an aussie Y7) its for spam and pipes (pipes are cool). I've also got a huge file full of yahoo mail hashes... people's password choices can be embarrassing~!

jmathai 13y ago

I worked at Yahoo! during a fairly large compromise. There were about 2.1M accounts which were phished. I think Yahoo!'s an easy target because 1) they have a lot of email users and 2) a lot of those users are older and/or more likely to be phished. It was a nightmare to fix the compromised account and took a team about 3 months to complete.

taylodl 13y ago

So is it the accounts being compromised or has Yahoo! itself been compromised? Last week I received mail delivery failure notices for an email apparently sent to my entire address book. If it hadn't been for a couple of old addresses in my book I wouldn't have even known it'd happened.

ropman76 13y ago

I had a yahoo account that got jacked Sunday Night. I checked my computers for any sort of malware and didn't find any. It was a completely automated attack that sent one large email to all my contacts.

litmus 13y ago

One of my accounts also got hacked sunday, with a sent message directly from the account (msg in sent folder) to all in adressbook. The initial breach showed the login from a country I haven't visited using a yahoo partner app. I only log in to my account with the browser. Never used a yahoo app...

jyu 13y ago

Are these yahoo accounts with 2 factor authentication enabled?

kjohnston 13y ago

My aunt's account was compromised, and she even had two-factor authentication turned on. Yahoo says the login occurred form Latvia so I don't think it was on her computer that logged in.

gesman 13y ago

Maybe someone will finally read these 11,000 of unread spam emails at my throw away yahoo account.