Yahoo has confirmed the theft of over 450-thousand usernames and passwords. The information was posted online by a hacker group, who says it didn’t publish the list maliciously, but instead to highlight security holes in Yahoo’s servers. In a statement, Yahoo said the file came from its Contributor Network and therefore contains the information of not just Yahoo users, but some gmail, Hotmail, aol, Comcast and MSN accounts as well. It added that the compromised file was old and of the usernames posted, less than 5% of the Yahoo accounts had valid passwords, but did not mention anything about the passwords from the other services. If you’re a user of the Yahoo Contributor Network, best to change your password right away. Security company Securi has set up a site where you can check to see if your email was one of the ones leaked, but if you’re not sure it never hurts to change up your passwords.
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