Yahoo’s email service hasn’t been known for safety and security. In fact, Yahoo email accounts are often used to send out spam. A Yahoo-backed email service in New Zealand was recently hacked and users started receiving huge amounts of spam emails.
Xtra, the largest ISP in New Zealand, offers an email service which relies on Yahoo at the back-end. Recently, two attacks were launched at the service. One of these attacks gave the attackers access to the users’ email contacts.
The second attack essentially leveraged this information to send out spam email to all of the contacts, asking the users to click on links which opened online advertisements. Although Xtra maintained that many users received the spam after one of their contacts clicked on it, users have pointed that out as a bluff.
According to one particular user, he received one of these spam emails from the account of his dead brother. Naturally, no one clicked on the link to further spread the spam. The user contends that most users have received the email, whether or not anyone in their contact list clicked on the malicious spam links.
So far, it is unclear as to how the attackers gained access to the contact details of thousands of users. Some have claimed that the Yahoo database had been directly breached, which seems likely. But so far, neither Yahoo nor Xtra has stated the source of the whole fiasco.
Courtesy: NZ Herald
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