Yahoo accounts hacked

Thirty-nine Telecom customers have had their YahooXtra email logons and passwords compromised as a result of a hacking attack on Yahoo.

The credentials were among 453,000 stolen from Yahoo and posted on the internet last week.

The details would have allowed anyone to open up and read the users' incoming email, though Yahoo said only five per cent of the accounts were valid and the rest were inactive and had been closed.

Telecom spokeswoman Jo Jalfon said they contacted 26 customers who had been affected and helped them change their passwords.

They suspended the accounts of the other 13, who could not be reached, so they could not be hacked.

Jalfon did not believe any of the accounts had been broken into or ''taken advantage of in any way''.

''None of our customers that we have talked to so far have lost any emails, had their account details altered, or had their accounts used maliciously since the hack announcement was made.''

Telecom outsourced its email service to YahooXtra in 2006. Security experts have criticised Yahoo for storing the credentials in a non-encrypted form.

Reports said a Ukrainian group, D33D, appeared to be responsible for the hack and had carried it out to highlight the security weakness.


- © Fairfax NZ News