Latin America. Sophos, a global cybersecurity firm, prepared this guide to help the more than 500 million people affected by the Yahoo! hack in 2014 that was recently announced in the media.
"We continue to see that, even in the largest companies, hackers manage to leak to steal private information that users provide when creating a profile: their password, date of birth or the data of the security question. Hackers are very adept at using such data to commit major fraud, so the consequences of that breach can extend beyond email," said James Lyne, Global Director of Security Research at Sophos.
"Becoming aware of any data theft is important because many people use the same password on multiple accounts," he added.
For Yahoo! users and internet users in general, Sophos recommends these six steps as a "good practice" for the protection of personal data and to anticipate possible problems that result from a loss of information:
1.- Immediately change your Yahoo! password
2.- Reset the password, if it is being reused on other online sites. Hackers use tools that detect reused passwords on major sites to make their job easier and make selling passwords and other hacked data more lucrative on the deep web.
3.- Create new passwords that are different and difficult to guess – yes, it is necessary to create different passwords for each site you visit.
4.- Include upper and lower case, numbers and symbols to make passwords more difficult to decipher.
5.- Do not trust password meters - they are inaccurate and unreliable.
6.- In general, it is always advisable to update passwords, password manager and security questions, if you hear of a probable loss of data that could affect users. It is very likely that the oldest data theft will impact in some way today.
