Sunnyvale, CA — Yahoo is now scrambling to protect customers whose passwords and usernames were stolen this week. The company is in the process of resetting compromised passwords.
Company executive, Jay Rossiter, believes the hackers were trying to gather names and email addresses from the affected accounts. Right now, the company said it’s “working with federal law enforcement to find and prosecute the perpetrators responsible.”
Yahoo said it has 273 million email accounts holders, but it’s not clear how many were compromised. To put that number into perspective, there are about 313 million US citizens.
Thursday, the company wrote in a blog post, “Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to yahoo mail accounts.”
If you are a yahoo email account holder, here’s what you need to know.
According to the company:
– Anyone with an account whose information was compromised was sent a text message Wednesday night. They were warned of “unusual activity on the network.”
– The information was likely taken from another companies database.
– Yahoo doesn’t believes its own servers were hacked, but it’s taking extra security measures to block attacks.
To protect yourself, the company suggests changing your password regularly, and not using the same password for multiple sites and services.
Rossiter apologized for the security breach.
