450,000 Yahoo! passwords leaked - NBC12.com - Richmond, VA News

Hundreds of thousands of Yahoo! usernames and passwords have been hacked and posted online.

Now there are major security concerns for people that rely on this internet giant.

Many people store valuable information in their email accounts. There are now 450,000 Yahoo! passwords have been posted online for the world to see.

A group of hackers posted this information to expose Yahoo!'s lax security practices.

Kevin Boynton runs the Computer Doctor of Richmond.

He said these passwords were stored in an unencrypted database - making it a fairly easy job for the hackers.

"Yahoo should have known better than to have saved these passwords in plain text," Boynton said.

So what should you do now?

The easiest thing you can do to protect yourself is to change your password ASAP.

"You should make sure you have a good, strong password," he said.  "It should be at least eight characters long. It should have a mix of letters, numbers, characters and a mix of lower and capital letters."

You would think only people with a Yahoo! account would be at risk here, but these accounts are from a company Yahoo! bought two years ago. This hacked database contains Gmail, Hotmail and email accounts from many other places.

These hackers may have been trying to prove a point and may not have had bad intentions - but now anyone that does has this information at their fingertips.

Boynton said you should stay away from storing personal information in your email.

"They are vulnerable. Anything on the web is vulnerable," Boynton said.  "It's important you store that information in a good, secure location such as on your personal computer in an encrypted file."

There is a site that shows which email addresses had passwords posted, but doesn't show the actual passwords.

Check to see if your account was hacked - link

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