Do I have a Yahoo account?

This fall Yahoo has announced two data breaches with 500 million and a billion accounts stolen. There are a large number of people hacking in various business, government and individual accounts all the time. There is no way to have a server connected to the Internet that is completed protected from breaches. You can make it securer and the data securer but you cannot stop a break-in from possibly happening. In addition, the more you make your material available to people the more openings to break in. So be assured there are break-ins and attempted break-ins of all systems all the time. Think of t like a store. If you allow people to touch merchandise, then shoplifting will occur. You may have accounts at yahoo that may have been stolen and not realize it. The media has played it up like it was email accounts stolen, but yahoo is lots more than that. Any account at Yahoo is in the breaches. Accounts that may have been stolen (Yahoo has not been clear yet) include Yahoo email accounts, email accounts that Yahoo administers, Flickr (Yahoo’s photo service), their fantasy sports programs, their blogging service Yahoo Groups and others. Email accounts run or administered by Yahoo include most of the former Bell telephone accounts like AT and T, BellSouth and others. When you go in your email look at the top and see if says powered by Yahoo. If so it is probably in breach. Google also administers accounts for others and Microsoft does so also. A lot of college email accounts are administered by Microsoft. What should you do if think you have a Yahoo account? Change the password on the account. If you have other accounts that use the same password and username change their passwords. I would encourage you to use different passwords everywhere. Easy way to do that is use something about site in the password (but not just that). CNN was saying to delete your old emails but that makes no sense. If they were stolen they already have them so doing does not stop them.