New Delhi: Yahoo has been resetting email accounts that were targeted in a cyber-attack apparently aimed at collecting personal information from recently sent messages, the company has said.
The cyber-attack was a coordinated effort by hackers who tried to log into many email accounts with stolen usernames and passwords, Yahoo said. However, the company did not mention how many accounts were affected.
The list of usernames and passwords used for the attack was likely collected when another company's database was breached, Jay Rossiter, a Yahoo senior vice president, said in a blog post.
The hackers used a malicious software program to access Mail accounts with the stolen usernames and passwords, Rossiter said.
For long free email services such as Yahoo, Google and Microsoft are a rich target for hackers, who use these accounts in spam services to collect information.
