Although Yahoo was ambiguous about the nature of the “third party” attack in its security update, it has no evidence to believe anything more than names and email addresses were extracted from the hacked accounts. Yahoo apologized for the breach:
We regret this has happened and want to assure our users that we take the security of their data very seriously.
Yahoo Security Steps
Yahoo is taking three steps to help protect users:
1. Resetting passwords for infected accounts and using a secondary sign-in verification for these users to re-secure their accounts
2. Contacting federal law enforcement to bring the cyber criminals to justice
3. Implementing additional security measures to thwart upcoming attacks
On your own side, be sure to change your passwords often and make them hard to crack by selecting variations of numbers, symbols and characters. You can check out the Yahoo Customer Care help page to learn more about safeguarding your account.