Yahoo mailbox got hacked

Trust me — you want them out of your life and not as permanent pen pals. Your email provider has seen this type of thing before and may be able to provide you with further details about the nature and source of the attack, as well as any tools they may have available to protect your information and get you back up and running. You may also have access to identity protection services through your insurance company, bank, credit union or employer. Notify everyone on your contact list that you have been compromised and they should look at any communication from you with suspicion for the time being.

Further, they should double down on their computer protection. If they have already been victimized, offer your condolences and support, and make sure they are following these steps, too. Hey, maybe forward them THIS article! Often their goal is much more insidious. Why crawl into a life unless you can truly monetize it? Therefore, beware of the Trojan. As a Stanford guy, that has always been my motto when dealing with people from USC.

In this case however, they may have inserted it into your system so that it can conduct recon and report back to them with all of your passwords or a treasure trove of your information.

Get that program running and eliminate any and all viruses, spyware or malware that it discovers. The hackers may have included some malicious links there too. In the event you shared your email passwords or security questions with any other site, change them, too. Too often consumers opt for convenience or simplicity over security and use a single password for multiple websites — including financial services, social media, retail or secondary email sites.

Not a good idea. Change all of them and use different passwords for each. Folks have a tendency to send financial or personally identifiable information to others via email and then archive the offending email in a file in their system.

If so, immediately go to whatever account is identified and change the user ID and password. Assuming that the hacker in question was able to find either your Social Security number or other valuable pieces of personally identifiable information, it will become important for you to monitor your credit and various financial accounts for suspicious activity.

You can get a copy of each of your three major credit reports for free once a year at AnnualCreditReport. Your email is an important component of your identity portfolio. You must manage it like an investment. The Ultimate Guide to Credit Scores. Shopify rolled out new algorithms in mid-December that resulted in several updates. In addition to minor changes to image requirements, it also included significant modifications to how the platform recommends apps that help fill out Shopify's robust ecosystem.

Many developers pay for advertising to drive traffic to their apps in Shopify's App Store. The company says the passwords that hackers stole were encrypted -- scrambled up with a tool called bcrypt. This kind of encryption can potentially be broken with enough persistence, said Brett McDowell, executive director of the FIDO Alliance, a nonprofit group that vets login systems.

That's especially true "when the attacker can make relatively accurate guesses at what the password might be," McDowell said. It's a common habit. Use the same password for lots of different accounts. If this breach has anything to teach you, it's that this is a terrible idea. If you recycled your Yahoo password on a different account, go change your password on that account too.

The hackers who have your password could easily try it on a whole bunch of different websites -- think bank websites or health insurance websites -- to try to access information beyond your Yahoo account. Since the hack exposed security questions that were not encrypted, change them. If you used the same security questions for other sites or services, change those, too. And if you're unsure, change them anyway. It's a headache, but doing so could save you a huge inconvenience in the future. Security questions are often used to verify identity and gain account access, without the help of email verification.

Some security experts go as far as recommending you create random, unique answers to security questions like, "Where was your mother born? Alexa and all related logos are trademarks of Amazon. Microsoft and the Window logo are trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the U. The Android robot is reproduced or modified from work created and shared by Google and used according to terms described in the Creative Commons 3.

Other names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Security Center Malware 4 things to do if your email account is hacked.

How to know your email has been hacked You may get an urgent message from a friend or family member who received a suspicious email from you. When you try to log in, you may get a message that your username or password is incorrect. This could mean the hacker changed your credentials to lock you out of your own account. Your sent-messages folder looks odd. Or, the folder may be sitting empty when you never deleted your sent messages. Strange messages appear on your social media accounts.

You email account can act as a gateway into other accounts. Change your credentials. If you do still have access to your account, make these changes right away: Get a new username and password. Choose a strong password. Secure passwords or passphrases should contain at least 12 characters, including numbers, symbols and a mix of capital and lowercase letters.

Use a unique password for every account. Password managers offer an easy and secure way to create complex passwords and to keep track of your login credentials. Change your security questions. The hacker may have gotten access to your account by guessing the answers to security questions.

Avoid choosing questions with answers that can easily be guessed or found online. Turn on two-step verification. Also known as multifactor authentication, this extra security measure typically requires you to enter your username and password along with a temporary passcode to get into an account.

For example, the service provider may send the one-time passcode to your phone each time you try to log in. Without your phone in hand, a hacker will be much less likely to gain entry into an account that has two-step verification turned on.