Yahoo Mail Passwords Database Compromised

Usernames and passwords of some of Yahoo's email customers have been stolen and used to gather personal information about people those Yahoo mail users have recently corresponded with, the company said Thursday. That could mean hackers were looking for additional e-mail addresses to send spam or scam messages. By grabbing real names from those sent folders, hackers could try to make bogus messages appear more legitimate to recipients.

"Recently, we identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts," Jay Rossiter, Yahoo's senior vice president for platforms and personalization products, wrote in a blog post Thursday. "Based on our current findings, the list of usernames and passwords that were used to execute the attack was likely collected from a third-party database compromise."

The company didn't say how many accounts have been affected. Yahoo is the second-largest email service worldwide, after Google's Gmail, according to the research firm comScore. There are 273 million Yahoo mail accounts worldwide, including 81 million in the U.S. Yahoo's mail service was affected by a similar attack in 2012, when hackers stole 400,000 usernames and passwords from a Yahoo contributor network. And earlier this year, Yahoo was the target of an attack in which cybercriminals planted malware in advertisements served on Yahoo's site. When the ad was clicked, the attackers were able to use victims' computers to mine for Bitcoins, the virtual currency.

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