In what is seen as the largest corporate breach ever, the hack of 500 million Yahoo accounts put users' information on high risk.
Yahoo has one billion users around the globe, who visit the website every month, and the extent of the 2014's attack is alarming. According to Pocket-lint, about 250 million people use Yahoo Mail, Flickr has about 113 million, 81 million use Yahoo Finance and tens of millions use Yahoo Fantasy Sports. While Tumblr has several hundred users, Yahoo said that the hack did not affect those accounts.
Since most accounts related to Yahoo services were breached, which the web search giant blames on a "state-sponsored actor." The hacked information includes names, addresses, security answers for password recovery, passwords to different accounts and banking credentials.
Since all this information is put at risk, users must follow some stern security measures to protect their private credentials from any sort of misuse. Below are some steps that every Yahoo user must follow to ensure the safety of their information online.
Step 1: Login to your Yahoo accounts and change the passwords immediately.
Step 2: Change passwords for recovery emails as well and for all the accounts related to Yahoo.
Step 3: Delete any email containing sensitive information and empty trash folder.
Step 4: Disconnect your Yahoo account from other services from account settings.
Step 5: Gmail offers better security. Switching to Gmail can be a wise move at this point.
Step 6: If you wish to continue Yahoo, enable two-factor authentication and setup Yahoo Account Key.
Step 7: Enable two-factor authentication for all personal accounts.
Step 8: Change passwords for all your banking accounts.
Step 9: Never open or download content from shady emails. It may contain malware.
With the news of cyber attacks becoming so common, it is important for Internet users to stay alert at all times. Despite stern security measures, most companies are a victim of cyber attacks.
As an Internet security expert Dan Kamisky said, "Five hundred of the Fortune 500 have been hacked. If anything has changed, it's that these attacks are getting publicly disclosed," according to Reuters.
