The Yahoo Hack Is Major, And Here Is What To Do With It | TechTree.com

The Yahoo Hack Is Major, And Here Is What To Do With It

Yahoo has revealed that over 500 million accounts were hacked by a ‘state actor’.

 

If you are a Yahoo user, you should be scared. According to media announcements made by the company, there has been a hack of over 500 million user accounts, which may result in data being compromised with. The hack is known to have taken place in late 2014, and the data compromised would include private details like names, email ids, telephone numbers, birth dates, passwords, and even some of the answers to security questions, included to protect individual accounts.

While there have been alerts sent to users to change their passwords and update registered mobile numbers, it is safe to say, that the users need to take some precautionary measures too. However, despite the large scale data breach, there are some security measures one can take up:

Yahoo now has a 2-tier security system put in place for some accounts. To enable this feature, one needs to head over to the yahoo account page, and login. Next click on account security, enable the 2-step verification procedure, by clicking the toggle button and then entering the mobile number. The next step is about clicking on ‘send sms’ or ‘call me’ options. After this, a verification key with other login details will be sent to the mobile phone, which needs to cross checked, and then logged in.

[Representative Image via GoHacking.com]

Also, this comes as a late development, where users just need their login-ids for accessing their Yahoo accounts. Once the id is put in, the registered mobile number will get a log-in notification including details of the system through which the log-in was attempted, and if correct, can instantly choose to log-in or stop the attempt. In order to access this, head over to account security, click on ‘Yes, send me a notification’, after which a test account key will be sent across on mobile. Once the user enters this key on the site, the user can log-in, and also later choose to use this gesture every time by verifying the phone number by clicking ‘confirm’.

Recommended: Yahoo Hacked But Is Anybody Safe Online?

Having taken these steps to secure the Yahoo account, one also needs to look into any other account that has been linked to the Yahoo account. The data breach may have even compromised on the passwords of these other accounts as well.

Till, word is out that Yahoo is working with law enforcement to trace and bring to book, the hackers who conducted the breach. Yahoo has also invalidated all the unprotected security questions, which are used by users to recover their passwords, and also asked them to change the same for future use. However, looking at the current situation, and sere scale of the breach, it would be advisable to use the 2-tier security or the mobile authentication key method to protect the account.

 


TAGS: Yahoo, Data theft, cyber security

 
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