Usernames and passwords of some Yahoo’s email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people, friends and family they have recently corresponded with, Yahoo Inc. says in a press release. It is the latest in a string of security breaches that have allowed hackers to grab personal information using software that analysts say is ever more sophisticated.
“We’re clearly under attack.”
Avivah Litan
Yahoo, the second-largest email service after Google’s Gmail. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, 81 million of them in the United States. The internet company will not say how many email accounts that have been compromised.
Probably because the Yahoo-people don’t know for sure, yet.
This is the latest in a string of security breaches that have allowed hackers to grab personal information using software that analysts say is ever more sophisticated.
Up to 70 million customers of Target stores in the US had their personal information and credit and debit card numbers compromised late last year.
“It’s an old trend, but it’s much more exaggerated now because the programmes the bad guys use are much more sophisticated now,” said Avivah Litan, a security analyst at the technology research firm Gartner.
“We’re clearly under attack”
In a blog post on its breach, Yahoo says: “The information sought in the attack seems to be names and email addresses from the affected accounts’ most recent sent emails.”
That could mean hackers were looking for additional email addresses to send spam or scam messages. By grabbing real names from those sent folders, hackers could try to make bogus messages appear more legitimate to recipients.
“It’s much more likely that I’d click on something from you if we email all the time,” says Richard Mogull, analyst and chief executive of Securois, a security research and advisory firm.
FULL SUMMARY@ASSOCIATED PRESS
And the “bad guys” as Mr. Litan call them – that’s the NSA, right?
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Reblogged this on Rational Arrogance and commented:
…by the NSA, right?