After having a mail box full of more SPAM rubbish this time prescription drugs from Canada I am beginning to get fed up with this happening so I post MY solution ... if you read and use yahoo please do something to stop the problem for the rest of us.
To stop the yahoo email hacks effecting your contacts ... which is all they really want... your email list.
Go to the yahoo webmail login, download the address/contacts to your PC, then install thunderbird email (free and runs in Windows or Linux)... then delete the online address
book... they can hack your yahoo account but send nothing to your contacts so we do not get spam from your account :-)
Do NOT select to auto add respondees to your contact list on the yahoo webmail pages and regularly check your contact list is empty.
And change your password to something decent not the same as your pet cat's name perhaps some combination of callsign, locator, a date and a special character (one of these !"£$ etc).
Thanks
Persistent attempts from hackers breaking/stealing passwords is a unfortunate side effect of our internet connected world; last year Yahoo ‘lost’ 450K user passwords through one data breach alone. Of course not all spam comes from hacked accounts; much of it is botnet generated, and often the ‘From:’ address in an e-mail is simply modified to mask the true sender’s identity. Hacking does happen however, and losing control of your email account can be a painful and salutary event; just use Google to read about Mat Honan’s epic hacking last year.
ReplyDeleteOne additional precaution that you can consider is adding two factor authentication to your Yahoo account. It’s an underappreciated feature of Yahoo’s security regime; you can enable it from your account settings and it can be configured to either ask you an additional question as part of the logon screen, or send a single shot response code to your mobile phone (or alternative email address – which I suggest not be a Yahoo account, and itself should have two factor authentication enabled). It adds minimal drag to the login process – but provides a worthy additional obstacle to hackers/spammers.