Help! My Yahoo account has been hacked

You have a Yahoo e-mail address, and suddenly friends are reporting that you’ve sent them spam, or an infected e-mail… Your Yahoo account has been compromised.

What does that mean?

Usually, this means that some internet robot hacking tool has guessed your password, and is now using your account maliciously. They may even go so far as to change your password, so that you’re now effectively locked out of your e-mail.

What should I do?

You should change your password(s) to your account(s) if you still have access to them. If not, you need to contact Yahoo’s customer service to get the account back. This procedure usually involves verifying personal information that you would have entered when you created the account. So you will stand a good chance of getting access.

How to prevent this

These situations either happen when a high-profile company like Yahoo becomes the target of a hack-attack, and your account information becomes available to the hacker. They probably end up selling your information to many places on-line, and now somebody has gained access to your account that way. They weren’t targeting you personally, they just found your name in a database of hacked accounts. The way to fight such a situation, is to change your password frequently, like once a year, or immediately once you’ve heard your e-mail provider has been hacked. Big companies like Hotmail, Google, Yahoo, AOL, MSN, etc… will be the biggest targets for these messed up hackers looking to make a big impact on the community. Therefore, you may want to limit what each account has access to. Which one gets your bank-notification e-mails? Which one’s tied to your PayPal, or Ebay account? Wherever the money’s accessible, the hacker will be sure to target this as their ultimate goal.

Another way that hackers might gain access to your account, is by guessing your password. Depending on how complicated your password is, it might be super-easy for a brain-nerd to guess it. They can write a program that will try words from a dictionary, or they may type their first guesses based on whatever personal information they have, like phone number, birth date, pet’s name, etc… Don’t make your password easy to guess. Make it long, have it contain typos, more than just one word. A good password is one that not only uses letters, but also special characters such as numbers AND symbols like ! ? … or even spaces. Have you ever thought of typing a quick phrase as your password? like “Old mcDonald had a Pharm!” – it may take a crazy long time to type in, but if you type it in 8 times per week, you’ll get pretty quick at typing the same thing. Also, this password will NOT get hacked, because Pharm is not a word, and “0ld mcDonald” has upper and lower case and numbers and special characters (space counts as a special character) in it. (the O is a zero!-) So with this password, the hacker would have to be a super-computer from 60 years in the future to be able to guess all the potential combinations of stuff.

No, my password is not “0ld mcDonald had a Pharm!” I would never tell you my password. OK, it’s actually: “0Fjpq%M_+iU!GvXfSuU82!{don’t try to guess my password, or die} &) o-<-< ”