Was Your ‘Yahoo’ Password Leaked? Find Out How Protect Your Accounts!

Last Wednesday, July 11, 2012, approximately 450,000 Yahoo! usernames and passwords were compromised. An old file was stolen and password information was published by a hacker group called D33Ds. What should you do now?

First, change your password. Make the password long and use numbers as well as symbols.

Next, here is a simple way to find out if your account info was leaked. Visit Sucuri Malware Labs and put your email in to see if it was compromised. It works well. I tried it and luckily my info was not leaked.

Lastly, set up different passwords for all of your accounts. It is very hard to remember multiple passwords for all of the Internet accounts that we have these days. There are programs available to help you manage multiple passwords like: KeePass for Windows or KeePass X for Mac users. Both of these are free. Another that I have heard good things about is 1Password. It costs $49.99 but it is a fairly easy solution to automatically create and manage a large number of extremely strong passwords on all of your devices. There is a free trial available. If you are like me, you have a mixture of Windows, Droid and Apple.

Here is more information regarding the leaked passwords:

According to Yahoo.com, "If you joined Associated Content prior to May 2010 your email address and password that you used to sign up may appear in the file posted online. Users who have not signed up for Associated Content (now Yahoo! Contributor Network) are not affected by this."

Steps to Take if You Think Your Account Was Compromised: The article posted about the password compromise at Yahoo.com recommneds, "If you joined Associated Content prior to May 2010 using a Yahoo! email address, please log in to change your password at: https://edit.yahoo.com/config/change_pw . If you are a non-Yahoo! email account holder, we apologize that we cannot provide you a direct means to secure your account. We strongly recommend that you employ the security mechanisms recommended by your email service provider to secure your account."