Yahoo's password hacked Posted by Adel Mubarak , Sunday, July 15, 2012 at 3:20 PM, in Labels: Security

Nearly 443,000 e-mail addresses and passwords for a Yahoo site were exposed late Wednesday. The impact stretched beyond Yahoo because the site allowed users to log in with credentials from other sites -- which meant that user names and passwords for Yahoo (YHOO, Fortune 500), Google's (GOOG, Fortune 500) Gmail, Microsoft's (MSFT, Fortune 500) Hotmail, AOL (AOL) and many other e-mail hosts were among those posted publicly on a hacker forum.

What's shocking about the development isn't that usernames and passwords were stolen -- that happens virtually every day. The surprise is how easily outsiders cracked a service run by one of the biggest Web companies in the world. The group of seven hackers, who belong to a hacker collective called D33Ds Company, got into Yahoo's Contributor Network database by using a rudimentary attack called a SQL injection.