Yahoo Password Breach And How To Prevent It

Do you know exactly how many things you can't do without email? An honest answer is, "too many to mention".

An email has become one of the most essential communication tools of our times, and everyone needs to at least have one. It has certainly become almost near impossible to apply for a job, sign up for HBO Max, order food online, or even use social media without email. It's not surprising that the reasons for having one have increased drastically over the years. 

People now use their email apps as a place to save more than just a ton of emails, and one thing that hasn't changed is that emails are still used to send very sensitive confidential information and data which must be kept private.

Yahoo's Infamous Breach Sequel

Yahoo suffered the largest data breach the world has ever seen, the company announced twice in 2016 that hackers had gained access to users’ accounts which contained eminently sensitive data including contacts, unencrypted security details, and passwords.  According to Yahoo, the first breach occurred in 2013 affecting over 1 billion user accounts, and was followed by another in 2014 leaving about 500 million users affected.

Hackers are unremittingly looking for ways to infiltrate emails and passwords belonging to thousands of Yahoo users every day. What motivates them to keep at it, is that they know that most people tend to be reluctant to create different passwords and, therefore, would reuse the same passwords for logging in to multiple websites.

Password breaches are some common ways in which hackers gain access to people's information, and Yahoo isn’t the only company whose users are on the target, once breached then behold, all is bare and available at the pleasure of hackers. What is most worrying is that said by many people on the internet that Yahoo remains to be highly susceptible to these attacks, and the methods used by hackers haven't changed much.

Protecting Yourself From Password Breach

One of the best ways that you can prevent a possible breach much like that of Yahoo is by making use of a password manager to help you create and store complex and unique passwords for your local applications and online accounts. Passwarden is an exceptional Yahoo password manager that employs client-side data encryption, all encryption algorithms run on the end user’s device. To ensure maximum privacy, the protocols in place render your personal data and passwords unreadable to any third parties, including Passwarden.

Best Practices to Prevent a Breach

1. In cases where you need to share your password(s) with anyone, make use of a Yahoo password manager to prevent a potential breach.
2. Create strong passwords containing numbers, multiple letter casings, and special characters.
3. Do not use the names of people around, your pets, street name, or your date of birth.
4. Strong passwords are usually long and difficult for anyone to make sense of, increasing the chances of surviving a possible breach.
5. Try to avoid using the same passwords for different websites or mobile apps like Yahoo Mail, this way if one password is compromised then hackers will still need to work hard to crack the rest.
6. Never save your passwords on your browser, rather memorize some passwords and write down each password on paper and store it safely.