Yahoo confirms coordinated Yahoo Mail hack

Yahoo mail users seem to be the most recent victim of mass data theft. Yahoo, in a security update posted today, claims to have “identified a coordinated effort to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo Mail accounts.” The company then took action on behalf of its users, prompting them to reset passwords on the breached accounts.

Yahoo caught wind of an attempted, coordinated hack to gain access to its Yahoo Mail accounts and the company is prompting the owners of affected accounts to reset their passwords, according to the company’s blog. A malicious computer software apparently used a list of Yahoo Mail usernames and passwords to try to get the names and email addresses from recent send emails. Yahoo says that the list of usernames and passwords that was used to execute the attack was likely collected from a third-party database, not from Yahoo’s own system.