Yahoo Japan Hacked
News from Japan today is putting the web world on alarm. Two of Japan's biggest web portals have been hacked. More than 100,000 user accounts have been impacted. User information such as credit card details were obtained during the hacks.
One of the web portals, Goo, told press that the company had to freeze thousands of account in order to prevent non-user logins. The company was hit by a series of attacks late last night — 30 attempts to login per second, to be exact.
Goo Wasn't the Only One
Another Japanese web portal, Yahoo Japan, is also reporting a series of aggressive hacks this morning. Yahoo Japan found a detrimental program on company computers. This program managed to snag data from more than 1.27 million users. Yahoo Japan claims that the program was stopped before any information left company property.
The two companies claim that the attacks were independent of each other, though it is highly coincidental that such attacks would happen simultaneously. Goo is less popular than Yahoo, but both companies still have a large stake in the Japanese web portal scene.
Yahoo Japan Hacked: What Happened?
It's difficult to pinpoint the exact happenings surrounding either attack. In the case of Yahoo, the attacks were internal. This means that the company isn't likely to disclose any of its findings. Goo, on the other hand, was attacked from the outside.
Goo representatives told press that the attacks were traced back to a specific IP address (or many), but this information has not been disclosed as of yet. Still, it just goes to show that even companies as large as Yahoo and Goo can face portal attacks.
Protection from the Inside Out
Making sure that company portals are safe from hack attacks isn't easy to do. If someone is attempting to hack into a company's users databanks ever second, it's tough to put a stop to this. The only thing that Yahoo Japan could do was to shut down the system, and that's what happened. In fact, that's what Goo did too, by freezing thousands of user accounts.
Goo is now asking users to select passwords that are harder to crack. Using a password that's related to an address or phone number is a bad idea. In the future, Goo will require users to select passwords that are far more difficult to crack. Yahoo Japan has stated that the company is working on making the site harder to crack into. Both sites would like to prevent a re-occurrence.
I will keep you updated as developments occur, but it's likely that neither company will report any additional information regarding either attack.
