Recently my Yahoo email account was hacked (sorry for anyone who got a spam email) it’s been happening more and more lately to friends and now it’s finally happened to me. It’s an awful feeling to know that you’ve been hacked and all your contacts–business, and friends–have been sent links to porn sites (funny story about that in a second).
Here’s the steps to take if anyone else out there gets hacked by these bastards.
1) Log into your account–if you still can.
2) Go to drop down bar and click on Account Info.
3) First, check your contact information. This should be where you’ve put in an alternate email account and/or your phone number. Hackers often change these to alternate email addresses, too. Check those and make sure they’re still the ones you had placed there.
4) Then click on the link that says “change your password” and change your password.
5) Then click on “update password-reset info,” follow the steps.
6) Then click on “set up your second sign-in verification,” (this is supposed to make it hard for you to ever get hacked again–if you, or anyone else, tries to log onto your email account from an unknown computer then they won’t be able to.)
7) Click on “view your recent sign-in activity,” this will show you where you’ve been hacked from (I was hacked from Romania).
8) Send an apology email to all those on your list and let them know that you’ve been hacked.
And here’s the funny story. A friend of mine, let’s call her Brittney, had just broken up with her long term boyfriend. They had been together for almost seven years, and a week after they had broken up Brittney’s email had gotten hacked. Well, this hacker sent out emails, but only to a handful of people in Brittney’s email list… but one of those people happened to be her ex-boyfriend. And what do you think the spam email was for…. Penis Enlargement pills. That’s right, a week after breaking up, Brittney’s ex-boyfriend received an email that said, “Here I think you need these…” and then there was a link to Penis Enlargement pills (and for those of you who think Brittney had done this as a joke and hadn’t really gotten hacked, the email also had gone to her uncle and a few other people too).
Anyways, hackers and spammers suck.
It’s actually been discovered that there is a huge security flaw in Yahoo!’s system, to the point that passwords aren’t even a concern for the hackers.
http://www.policymic.com/articles/27916/yahoo-hacked-ceo-marissa-mayer-faces-hacking-incident-during-first-year-on-the-job
Apparently changing one’s password doesn’t help, as the hackers only use each account one time in a 2-month period; this isn’t in the article but has been discovered on my own time, between the e-mails I have received from inactive contacts over the last two years, and the e-mails that were sent out from my own account.
This problem has only recently become a big concern for the company, but they apparently don’t want to admit that it has been going on for much longer. Similar problems arose in 2006 with security flaws that allowed attackers to easily take command of accounts by sending viruses and scripts through Yahoo! Instant Messenger, which some people may still receive (every now and then I’ll get an IM full of plaintext script).
More on the current hacking problem:
http://thenextweb.com/insider/2013/03/06/despite-its-efforts-to-fix-vulnerabilities-yahoos-mail-users-continue-reporting-hacking-incidents/