Yahoo announced in a statement Thursday night that some usernames and passwords for the Yahoo Mail service had been compromised, The Washington Post reported.
The data was collected through malicious computer software and likely taken from a third-party database, Yahoo said in the post.
"We regret this has happened and want to assure our users that we take the security of their data very seriously," the company said.
Yahoo is taking measures to protect its users by sending out alerts to change passwords. If your account has been compromised, here are some things you should do.
Change your password right away.
Hacking is in the news almost every day, but the danger is still the same. Choose a new password, and make sure it isn't one of these.
Switch up log-in credentials for any account with the same password.
This point is especially true if you used the compromised Yahoo email address as your username, The Washington Post noted. Even a similar email address may not be safe; after all, "it's not a big leap for hackers to think that you may be both jdoe@yahoo.com and jdoe@gmail.com."
Watch for spam.
The hacking job seems to have gathered names and email addresses most recently contacted by the compromised accounts, The Washington Post reported. If you get a fishy email from someone you don't know, it could be spam. Don't open it, don't reply to it and definitely don't click any links in the message.
As of Friday, Yahoo hadn't revealed how many users were affected by the hacking job.
The email service has more than 100 million daily users, according to Bloomberg.
Yahoo is far from being the only company to fall prey to hackers.
"Security attacks are unfortunately becoming a more regular occurrence," the company noted in Thursday's post.
The FBI recently warned a group of retailers that Target's fiasco last year, when some 70 million customer accounts were compromised, could happen to them. The popular messaging service Snapchat also suffered a hacking job around New Year's Day that exposed 4.6 million user phone numbers.
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