Hackers have gained access recently to Yahoo passwords of nearly four hundred and fifty thousand users. Yahoo has announced that it has sorted out the security flaws and is claiming that it has taken action to fix the vulnerability by deploying extra security measures for the affected users. All those affected users will be asked a series of authentication queries and will be informed to change their security information including their password.

A hacker group called D33DS Company has hacked into an unidentified sub domain of Yahoo’s website and got into those accounts which were not encrypted. Yahoo has confirmed to Computer World that the stolen account credentials belonged to registered users of its Contributor Network that was earlier known as Associated Content. This is a part of the Yahoo Contributor Network and the users who contribute to this network are also required to sign in using a Yahoo, Gmail or Facebook ID.

If you have used a log in to any user service provided by Yahoo through any other identification such as Gmail or Facebook, you will have to change your password for that particular account too as it could have been hacked.

This case of Yahoo getting hacked is the second biggest hack job of the year after LinkedIn was hacked some months ago. It caused almost six million users access loss to their accounts. The tech security on part of these companies has become a big issue of concern. Part of the blame is being passed on to some Yahoo users after an analysis was done on the passwords. Of the passwords that were hacked, more than two thousand of them had passwords like `password’ or `123456’.

Just four days ago, another social networking site, Formspring, disabled almost thirty million registered user passwords after many hundreds of thousands of them were leaked to the Web in their encrypted form.