The biggest security news in the mainstream press was about the password (hash) "breaches" at LinkedIn, eHarmony, and last.fm. Last week, it was a bunch of passwords that were leaked via a Yahoo! service. These passwords were for a particular Yahoo! service, but the e-mail addresses being used were for quite a few domains. There has been some discussion of whether, for example, the passwords for Google accounts were also exposed. The short answer is, if the user committed one of the cardinal sins of passwords and reused the same one for multiple accounts, then, yes, some Google (or other) passwords may also have been exposed. Having said all of that, that isn't primarily what I wanted to look at today. I also don't plan to spend too much time on the password policy (or lack thereof) or the fact that the passwords were apparently stored in the clear, both of which most security folks would probably agree are bad ideas.
Reference:
http://www.dshield.org/diary/An+analysis+of+the+Yahoo+passwords/13720


