Yahoo confirmed on Thursday that about 400,000 passwords were in fact stolen.

"We confirm that an older file from Yahoo! Contributor Network (previously Associated Content) containing approximately 400,000 Yahoo! and other company users names and passwords was stolen yesterday, July 11," the company said in a statement to CNBC.

Of the stolen passwords, however, less than five percent of the Yahoo accounts had valid passwords, the company said in the statement.

The company is fixing the vulnerability and changing passwords of affected Yahoo users. It is also notifying companies whose accounts may of been compromised, according to the statement.

A previously unknown hacker group first posted online the details of 450,000 user accounts and passwords it said it had taken from a Yahoo server.

The Ars Technica technology news website reported that the group, which calls itself D33DS Company, hacked into an unidentified subdomain of Yahoo's [YHOO 15.7299 -0.0701 (-0.44%) ] website where they retrieved unencrypted account details.

The affected accounts appeared to belong to a voice-over-Internet-protocol, or VOIP, service called Yahoo Voices, which runs on Yahoo's instant messenger. The Voices service is powered by Jajah, a VOIP platform that was bought by Telefonica Europe BV in 2010.

The hackers' website where the original claim was made, d33ds.co, was not available later on Thursday. It was registered in February. Industry website CNET reported the hackers as saying the breach was intended as a "wake-up call and not as a threat" and that Yahoo's security was lax.

The Voices hack is one of several in recent months. The business networking service LinkedIn admitted last month that 6.4 million member passwords had been stolen from its website.

Ileke-IdI:
Yahoo sef lol.

Who still uses Yahoo for important emails?

Abeg they can hack into mines, all dey there na NL messages, garbage and spam.

It scares me to have any important docs sent to/from yahoo emails. The yahoo website even looks downtrodden.

Okija_juju:

No talk o...

What of our discreet correspondences.. You knw na

Okija_juju:

No talk o...

What of our discreet correspondences.. You knw na

Next2Bezee: SQL Injection most likely, Time to go change my password.

miracle4: u can use this link to check if your was hacked WWW.labs.sucuri.net/?yahooleak

Jenny20:

Sorry the link you posted isn't working?

Any other solution?

Old-Hag:


Change your password!!

miracle4: u can use this link to check if your was hacked http://labs.sucuri.net/?yahooleak

Ejiné: Phucking arse.
Who still uses that trash called Yahoo? If it isn't their bulky pages which are too heavy, slow, cloggy and buggy to use, it's their trash system that keeps marking my IP as spam, and keeps telling me my account is invalid. My yahoo doesn't even sync my Mozilla Thunderbird, so what's the freaking use?

Thank God for the more serious guys like G-Mail and their smoother, cleaner, lighter services.

By the way, I think the guys who even did the hacking are retarrds. Who still cares about Yahoo?
If you ask politely, TRUST ME, I'll gladly give you my Yahoo password, so it's even pointless to 'hack'.

What a total waste of time on an inconsequential venture.