Yahoo! Japan says 22 MEELLION User IDs may have been nabbed Yahoo! Japan has told its 200 million customers to change their passwords after revealing that 22 million user IDs may have been exposed in a suspected intrusion last week. The attack was detected at around 9:00 PM local time on Thursday night, with the internet giant apparently cutting access while it checked what had …
Given the almost daily emails I get from people with yahoo (and btinternet) a/cs that appear to have been hacked and started sending spam/malware links. and the apparent total inability of yahoo to work out how it's happening and block it (or even acknowledge that there's a massive hole in their system), I can't say I'm too surpised that someone has managed to get a bit deeper into their system.
This type of effort is usually done to harvest email accounts to spam or for other nefarious purposes. One of these types bothered to admit what s/he was doing openly to me in 2006 via yahoos instant messaging client. Offering the information to the authorities is pointless. I sometimes seriously consider this really is an oligarchy and all of the people in positions of power are hell-bent on screwing every last one of the little guys - without gel if possible.
Exceptions would be our fearless reporters at El Reg, and the honest, clean commenters such as the ones above and below me, here.
For those who forgot the password and got locked out, the simplest solution is to forget the locked-out ID and create a new ID. Many of us repeat this many times and it would be easy for a country with 124 million population to have 200 million IDs. The root of this problem is our inherent inability to remember any more than 5 textual passwords, with the difficulty of remembering the relations between the ID and the corresponding password included.
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