Yawn… Telecom works through the night

Did you sleep well? Chances are Telecom didn't.

No such chance in fact, as the telco launched all-out war overnight on the malware responsible for yet again bringing Yahoo's Xtra email account to its knees.

Following reports late Tuesday afternoon that some customers were receiving suspicious looking emails, Kiwis typically went into panic mode - fearing another February attack.

Okay, not exactly panic mode, more a case of…of sh*t, here we go again.

But thankfully Telecom urged everybody to relax, insisting the damage was not as long-lasting as the previous mega-breach two months ago.

"Telecom has implemented a new, simpler, process to protect customers whose accounts appear to have been compromised in a new malicious email incident over the past 24 hours or so," said Lucy Jackson, spokeswoman, Telecom.

"A compromised account means that the customer’s email account is potentially being misused to send suspicious emails."

The new process, which was committed in Telecom's email review announcement last Friday, means that affected customers who usually log onto their Yahoo Xtra email via webmail will now be automatically directed to a web page that steps them through how to change their password and make any necessary changes to their account settings.

"All affected customers, including those who access their Yahoo Xtra email via other methods, such as Outlook mail or other email applications, will receive an email tonight, advising them to change their password immediately," Jackson said.

"We began urgent investigations with our email provider Yahoo to identify the source of this latest issue..

"This included submitting examples of these suspicious emails for Yahoo to analyse and attempt to trace the source.

"Based on this analysis, Yahoo implemented some additional security protocols."

If a customer’s email account has potentially been compromised, previous experience has shown that the most effective way to re-secure their account is to change their email password according to Telecom.

"We would again like to sincerely apologise to all of our customers who have been affected by this latest incident," Jackson said.

"In particular those whose accounts have been misused to send suspicious emails, as well as those who have received such emails.

"It is extremely disappointing to us that this incident seems to have recurred and we are in active discussions with Yahoo to gain a better understanding of the cause of this latest incident."

Hacked off with hacking? Should we continue to put up with such breaches? Read the May issue of NetGuide to find out.

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