Was Your Yahoo! Password Exposed?

HACKING -- July 12, 2012 at 12:30 PM EDT

Was Your Yahoo! Password Exposed?

News broke late last night that the Yahoo Voices service was hacked, exposing more than 450,000 usernames and passwords. If you'd like to check whether your email address was included we've built this tool: Type in your username or email address and we'll crawl the list for you.

(Note: We are not storing any of the data that you put into the tool.)

If you prefer to see the entire list, it was published by the hackers here. Note it is a large file and may take a while for your browser to load.

Yahoo is the most recent in a series of high profile hacks. LinkedIn, Last.fm , Eharmony and Formspring were also recently hacked, compromising millions more passwords.

Simple tips for creating stronger passwords

use a combination of letters, numbers and special characters, lowercase and uppercase
make it long; at least 8, preferably many more characters
use a passphrase instead of a word if that is easy to remember
avoid sequences such as 123456 or common dictionary words or common names

Why does it matter? This image from Thomas Baekdal shows how long it takes to hack passwords based on their composition:

For more on building strong passwords see these tipsheets: From security software makers McAfee and Norton From Google From Microsoft

You can check the strength of your password here

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