Yahoo! Voices Hacked

Yesterday Yahoo! Voices reported that security for the service had been compromised. Yahoo! Voices is a network where your expertise and perspective are in the spotlight. It boasts millions of videos, articles and slide shows all published by Yahoo! users.

Mashable reported that a list titled “Owned and Exposed” ,which is brought to you by the D33Ds Company, revealing a number of details for the service including all of the email addresses and passwords for Yahoo Voice’s 450k users. Mashable also goes on to report, “The site hosting the information is intermittently down, however, we were able to open the document and verify that it does in fact contain user emails and password data.”

So if you are one of the many Yahoo! Voice users get the password changed! It is always a good idea to change your passwords up periodically anyway. And please remember, passwords are your first line of defense.

Here are some tips we found that we hope can help you.

What makes a password strong (or weak)?

A strong password:

• Is at least eight characters long.
• Does not contain your user name, real name, or company name.
• Does not contain a complete word.
• Is significantly different from previous passwords.
• Contains characters from each of the following four categories:

  Character category	Examples
  Uppercase letters	A, B, C
  Lowercase letters	a, b, c
  Numbers	0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
  Symbols found on the keyboard (all keyboard characters not defined as letters or numerals) and spaces	` ~ ! @ # $ % ^ & * ( ) _ – + = { } [ ] \ | : ; ” ‘ < > , . ? /