Have your friends recently texted you about spam originating from your Yahoo Mail account? If so, that may be because you (and many of your friends) were hacked.
Yahoo acknowledged Thursday that attackers now own an undisclosed number of usernames and passwords to Yahoo Mail accounts. In a blog post, Jay Rossiter, the senior vice president in charge of Yahoo’s platforms and personalization products,
wrote that the attackers had most likely hacked an external, third-party database and obtained the information there.
“We regret this has happened and want to assure our users that we take the security of their data very seriously,” Rossiter wrote.
Yahoo did not say how many accounts had been compromised, nor when the attacks had taken place. However, the company says it began notifying users that the attacks had taken place, and had begun using second sign-in verification to allow users to re-secure their accounts. Users who have been affected, unsurprisingly, will be asked to change their password, and may receive an SMS text to that effect, Yahoo said.
