Late last month,Yahoo! confirmed that nearly a half billion (with a B!) accounts were hacked in 2014! Nearly three years after the fact, this ranks as one of the biggest data breaches ever.
It’s serious enough when the bad guys get ‘only’ an email address and password, but this was even worse. Personal full names, phone numbers, birth dates, and security questions, were all harvested in the Yahoo! hack. So not only is your Yahoo e-mail account at risk, but so is any other account where you have reused account credentials, or those security questions that are supposed to fully verify you’re you.
This can be a huge problem, as estimates suggest maybe as many as 75% of folks use the same passwords, over and over, everywhere... and many haven't changed their passwords in a LONG time. In one survey, almost 25% of respondents reported using a password that was over 10 years old! That's a lot of time to go with a password that isn’t secure anymore.
And once the bad guys have a single password, and the kind of personal info they collected in the Yahoo! hack, they can potentially use that info to make educated guesses about all kinds of other accounts… banking, shopping, investments, medical, other on-line email accounts. The list is endless, and the implications of them getting access are truly scary.
We’ve mentioned it before, many times, but this is just another pointed reminder to use different passwords for different accounts, to make those passwords complex and difficult to guess --and change them regularly. And we’d add our name to the long list of IT pros who have said that if you’re still using a Yahoo! account at all, even if you’ve changed your password, stop.
