The Yahoo hack FAQ

Was my account hacked? Well, there were 500 million users affected of 1 billion active users, so chances are 1 in 2 that it was. What should I do now? Login with your current details, change your password to a strong, unique one and enable two-factor/multi-step authentication so that you have to receive a text or email (SMS) to login next time. What data was stolen by the hackers? Users’ personal data, birthdays, phone numbers, including unencrypted answers to secret account recovery questions (change those too and don’t use your actual pets’ nor mother’s maiden name, they’re easy for hackers to find out from Facebook etc!), but apparently not credit card details. Did the hackers get my password? If your account is one of the unlucky half a billion, then the hackers got a “hashed”, or scrambled, version of your password. Hashed passwords have random letters and numbers added to them to disguise the password, it’s very difficult to work out what this random data is and so recover the actual password. What about my logins for other sites? As long as you didn’t use the same password as your Yahoo login, you should be fine. If you did, change the password on those accounts too to a unique, strong password. Who were the hackers? Yahoo says it doesn’t know for sure, but they suspect a “rogue” state is responsible. WTF? Indeed! It’s thought that the most likely explanation is that the rogue state wa...
Source: David Bradley Sciencebase - Songs, Snaps, Science - Category: Science Authors: Tags: Science Source Type: blogs