Not a good way to start the day… from an email from Yahoo!

You may have read in press reports that Yahoo! recently confirmed an older file containing approximately 450,000 email addresses and passwords—provided by writers who had joined Associated Content prior to May 2010—was publicly posted on the Internet. This file was a standalone file that was not used to grant access to Yahoo! systems and services. This message is being sent to an email address in this compromised file.

I signed up with Associated Content once just to poke around and see what they did. I don’t know what password I used. But my user name was on the list (here)If you don’t want to click that link, just Google search Yahoo passwords hacked and look for a link to follow.

…and like many, I used the same password often – but with different user names – on a lot of different websites.

A LOT…

Heads Up

If you get an email from mvanpatten@yahoo.com and you think it is suspicious. DON’T OPEN IT. I never use that email address. NEVER.

Even before I signed up for Gmail, I used a different email address. Never used Yahoo.com email.

But – a favor – if you get an email from mvanpatten@yahoo.com, please let me know at my gmail.com account: GoingLikeSixty@gmail.com.

Thanks.

I’ve changed a ton of passwords already today and revoked privileges to a ton of others.

Oh joy.

Living in Costa Rica sets off a ton of red flags under normal circumstances, now we have to deal with this.

BTW: Amazon.com has been the only proactive (so far) website to alert me that my name was on the list. They went ahead and changed my password.

Kudos to Amazon.com.

UPDATE: Kudos to Hulu.com too…

We want to protect our users from any difficulties resulting from Yahoo’s breach, so we have disabled your current password as a precautionary measure in case you used the same one on both sites. Because of this, you will need to create a new password to access your Hulu account. You can easily do so one of two ways: