6 ms·

That's not a Yahoo hack though. When that happens it is almost always your local machine that has been breached by a virus which simply reads the locally stored

by rll 12y ago

That's not a Yahoo hack though. When that happens it is almost always your local machine that has been breached by a virus which simply reads the locally stored contact list. And to answer your question, no, it is not a regular occurrence for Yahoo, or any of the major players, to have their servers hacked.

chaostheory 12y ago
To my knowledge, my machine is secure. It wasn't Windows and I had both anti-virus and a firewall active. For one thing, what made this strange was that I haven't even logged into Yahoo for months (probably close to a year) when this happened, repeatedly.
- nitrogen 12y ago
  Another possible explanation is password reuse on a site that was breached.
  - chaostheory 12y ago
    I don't reuse my passwords.
- danielweber 12y ago
  Could also be password guessing; lots of people use the "common word + number" pattern for their Yahoo! passwords.
  - chaostheory 12y ago
    If I remember correctly it was a random alpha-numeric password with both different cases and a special character or two, and I've never used the same password on a different service. All I know is that I've never had this problem on competing services.
    - ryan-c 12y ago
      I've found XSS bugs that allow full account takeover being actively exploited on Yahoo! a couple of times. They have a lot of legacy crap that was written 15-20 years ago.
syntheticnature 12y ago
A number of times in recent memory Yahoo has been subject to attacks using XSS and similar. One example of one that was exploited (there was a disclosure back in May, but that didn't have reports of active exploits): http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/31/yahoo-mail-users-still-seeing-accounts-hacked-via-xss-exploit-amid-reports-yahoo-failed-to-fix-old-flaw/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/31/yahoo-mail-users-st...
- chaostheory 12y ago
  It may explain it for other users, but at the time I hadn't logged into any yahoo service for months.

by rll 12y ago

chaostheory 12y ago

To my knowledge, my machine is secure. It wasn't Windows and I had both anti-virus and a firewall active. For one thing, what made this strange was that I haven't even logged into Yahoo for months (probably close to a year) when this happened, repeatedly.

nitrogen 12y ago
Another possible explanation is password reuse on a site that was breached.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  I don't reuse my passwords.
danielweber 12y ago
Could also be password guessing; lots of people use the "common word + number" pattern for their Yahoo! passwords.
- chaostheory 12y ago
  If I remember correctly it was a random alpha-numeric password with both different cases and a special character or two, and I've never used the same password on a different service. All I know is that I've never had this problem on competing services.
  - ryan-c 12y ago
    I've found XSS bugs that allow full account takeover being actively exploited on Yahoo! a couple of times. They have a lot of legacy crap that was written 15-20 years ago.

syntheticnature 12y ago

A number of times in recent memory Yahoo has been subject to attacks using XSS and similar. One example of one that was exploited (there was a disclosure back in May, but that didn't have reports of active exploits): http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/31/yahoo-mail-users-still-seeing-accounts-hacked-via-xss-exploit-amid-reports-yahoo-failed-to-fix-old-flaw/ http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/01/31/yahoo-mail-users-st...

chaostheory 12y ago
It may explain it for other users, but at the time I hadn't logged into any yahoo service for months.