Privacy, Internet Security | featured news

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.