[Noisebridge-discuss] yahoo hacked - plain text passwords!!!!!

[Jake]

i was wondering why i kept getting so much yahoo spam, from people i used 
to know.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1009_3-57471178-83/yahoos-password-leak-what-you-need-to-know-faq/

A hacker collective calling itself D33Ds Co. publicly posted more than 
450,000 login credentials -- i.e., paired usernames and passwords -- 
obtained from Yahoo's "Contributor Network" site. In that data dump, the 
hackers described their attack as a "union-based SQL injection," which is 
effectively a way of tricking the database on a poorly secured site into 
divulging private information.

Which, in this case, yielded a treasure trove of usernames and passwords, 
apparently all stored in plain text -- itself a fairly significant 
security failure on Yahoo's part. Passwords are usually cryptographically 
masked in a process called "hashing" to prevent exactly this sort of mass 
disclosure.