Kicked out of Yahoo ?

by venukb on September 26, 2006

Today I received a mail from Yahoo (my-yahoo-register@yahoo-inc.com) with this content:

Your Yahoo! ID is: somethingsomething

Your password for this account has recently been changed. You don’t need to do anything, this message is simply a notification to protect the security of your account.

Please note: your new password may take awhile to activate. If it doesn’t work on your first try, please try it again later.

DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. For further help or to contact support, please see http://help.yahoo.com/help/edit/

Now the problem is I don’t remember changing the password of this yahoo account. The question is:why the hell did I get this message ?

One reason might be that my password is compromised and somebody has reset/changed the password !

But with the set of security tools I am running, I somehow tend to believe that this is not possible.

Not being overconfident, I happened to change the passwords for the other accounts from my office, which I believe is more secure than my home system

I have not been using this Yahoo account from quite some time. Does Yahoo automatically change/reset the password ?

To make things worse, I don’t remember the details needed to reset the password. And this ID also happens to be my first E-Mail ID on Internet :)

Anybody else faced a similar problem ?

Popularity: 5% [?]

{ 11 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Shivaranjan 09.26.06 at 5:49 am

Till now I have not faced such a problem. I think you better contact their support to get more details regarding this.

2 Vasuki 09.26.06 at 9:19 am

Hey, you are not the first one! I got the same gift, that too on my birthday!
I had got a link from a friend to see his photos in some page that looked like Yahoo…and I had logged in there. Do you remember doing something similar to that?

Also, that was my first email account too (that too a yahoo.com account, not a yahoo.co.in account!) And it was created by my friend. So, I was not sure what zip code and other details he had given, which are needed for password recovery. The only thing you can do now is to create a new yahoo id and send message to all your buddies in the list not to click on any link coming from your old id.

3 Venu 09.26.06 at 10:34 am

Oh ! I don’t remember clicking on some link like that, but If I think a little bit more, I guess I got a link to see one of my friends photos (again not sure)

and like yours, mine also was a yahoo.com account and was infact created by Vedu ! I have to catch hold of him for the recovery details I guess :)

4 Harish 09.26.06 at 4:34 pm

The so called link is just a phishing link, where the view of the webpage looks just like the Yahoo Photos page. From all i could guess, entering username and password does nothing but send that details to who ever created it and also send the link as offline message to your friends on YM. (each link is different but is the same or similar page). Many people i know have fallen for it.

5 venukb 09.26.06 at 4:37 pm

Oh Now I got it, I remember seeing one offiline message some time back from one of my friend and I wanted to ask him later about the photos !! Damn..

But why did those guys take so much time ? Probably they had a a big backlog :)

6 Damn Yahoo ! at Online Diary 10.14.06 at 4:19 pm

[...] As mentioned in one of my previous posts, my Yahoo account was compromised because of possible a phishing attack. Other than being my first email ID on Internet, many services like Flickr (fortunately not a pro account), yahoo photos etc were linked with this account. [...]

7 Meee 11.18.06 at 9:10 am

And does anybody knows how to recover the damn password….??? …I need to check on my email!….

8 Venu 12.03.06 at 8:53 pm

Meee..
Did you try contacting yahoo support ?

I again sent them a mail today, hope to get response at least this time :(

9 2006 December 06 « Online Diary 12.07.06 at 2:40 am

[...] Kicked out of Yahoo ?  7 Venu, Meee, venukb, Harish, Venu [...] [...]

10 Jeff 07.12.07 at 9:24 pm

I’ve had my yahoo account password hijacked twice in the past year or so. Fortunately, I eventually remembered the info I needed to reset my password and get my account back. It had been several years since I had initially submitted that data. It’s frustrating as hell when you have no way to get into your own account, but I really wouldn’t want Yahoo giving my account info out to anyone who claimed to be me and said they forgot it. Bottom line: Your’re not alone.

11 Venu 07.12.07 at 11:06 pm

Thanks Jeff for sharing your thoughts. When I was about to buy flickr, I asked them what would happen to my flickr pro account if something like this happens.

I also happened to give the ID of the account which was hacked, and flickr team helped me by resetting the password :)

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