Gmail and Yahoo Mail passwords exposed


infoworld.com

Google's Gmail and Yahoo's Mail were also targeted by a large-scale phishing attack, perhaps the same one that harvested at least 10,000 passwords from Microsoft's Windows Live Hotmail, according to a report by the BBC.

Microsoft , for its part, said late yesterday that it had blocked all hijacked Hotmail accounts, and offered tools to help users who had lost control of their e-mail.

Gmail was the target of what Google called a large-scale phishing campaign, the company told the BBC. "We recently became aware of an industry-wide phishing scheme through which hackers gained user credentials for Web-based mail accounts including Gmail accounts," a Google spokesperson told the news network.

The BBC also said it has seen a list of some 20,000 hijacked e-mail accounts; the list included accounts from Gmail, Yahoo Mail, AOL, Comcast and EarthLink. The latter two are major U.S. Internet service providers. "As soon as we learned of the attack, we forced password resets on the affected accounts," the Google spokesperson also told the BBC. "We will continue to force password resets on additional accounts when we become aware of them."

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