Hackers, Password | featured news

It’s a good idea to be a little paranoid about password theft, and there are several ways to strengthen your defenses.

The company said that although the breached accounts include user names from Yahoo and other companies, only 5% of the accounts had valid passwords. Yahoo said it is working to fix the vulnerability and is changing the passwords of the affected users. The company also said it is notifying other companies whose users may have been affected -- earlier we reported that they may include people who use AOL, Gmail, Hotmail and many others.

Yahoo has been the victim of a security breach that yielded hundreds of thousands of login credentials stored in plain text. The hacked data, posted to the hacker site D33D Company, contained more than 453,000 login credentials and appears to have originated from the Web pioneer's network. The hackers, who said they used a union-based SQL injection technique to penetrate the Yahoo subdomain, intended the data dump to be a "wake-up call."

Yahoo Inc. said Thursday it is investigating reports of a security breach that may have exposed nearly half a million users' email addresses and passwords... The little-known group was quoted as saying that they had stolen the passwords using an SQL injection -- the name given to a commonly-used attack in which hackers use rogue commands to extract data from vulnerable websites.

A Russian hacker claims to have uploaded almost 6.5 million LinkedIn passwords, The Verge reports. LinkedIn in says in a tweet that "Our team is currently looking into reports of stolen passwords. Stay tuned for more."

Several gaming news outlets are reporting that Sony’s PlayStation Network password reset system has a weakness that makes it vulnerable to hackers.

Some pacemakers are accessible wirelessly for reprogramming, but the trouble is that this easy access could be abused maliciously. Sure, passwords would keep the devices safer from such intrusions, but the patient could forget or lose those. Solution? Password tattoos.