Yahoo Hacked: What should be done

Yahoo has announced another ‘MEGA BREACH’ in accounts, and that’s one billion this time. If your account is among them, you are most probably panicking right now, as hackers have all your information which include full names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, hashed passwords, and possibly security questions and answers as well.

For Yahoo users and all computer users, Sophos' Senior Security Advisor John Shier advises these 6 steps as “best practice” for protecting personal data and pre-empting potential fallout from any data breach:

“Being aware of any data breach is important because many people use the same password for multiple accounts. Even data breaches from several years ago could still impact you today.

1. Consumers need to be aware of targeted phishing scams, a socially-engineered attack that cybercriminals use to lure people into clicking malicious URLS with malware. This is extremely important, now that personally identifiable information (PII) is in the wild as a result of this breach.
2. Change your Yahoo password and security questions immediately, especially if you use them on multiple accounts. As a rule of thumb, don’t use the same security questions and answers for all of your accounts.
3. Make all new passwords different and difficult to guess. Cybercriminals are now using tools that sniff out passwords reused on other, more valuable sites to make their work easier and to make the stolen passwords and other hacked data more lucrative on the dark web.
4. Include upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols to make passwords harder to crack - refer to the Sophos How to Pick a Proper Password video for creating stronger passwords.                                                     Read Also: One Billion Accounts for Yahoo Hacked
5. Don’t trust password strength meters - these are unreliable and inaccurate.
6. In general, it’s always good practice to update your passwords, password manager and security questions, if you hear of a potential data breach that might affect you.”