To all Yahoo users, you might just want to check up on your user names and passwords on your Yahoo accounts and start doing some changes. Just recently, I have personally received a warning about a password change for one of my Yahoo accounts, to my surprise, I didn’t do anything that would trigger for me to change it (I don’t even visit that yahoo address).

And since this certain event triggered my curiosity, I went online to search for facts to check if something is going on in the Yahoo world. Again, I’ve come across a post that wrote about a possible Yahoo breach.

I read a little about it and found out that: Yesterday, around 450k passwords were “pilfered” from Yahoo, Scary as it seems as this was done by hackers (yeah, and they were vocal about what they did too)

Though this exercise they’ve (hackers) done, they are saying it’s serving as a wake – up call to all users with easy to hack passwords. To give you a sample of a few passwords that were exposed, CNET has a breakdown as shown below:

• 2,295: The number of times a sequential list of numbers was used, with “123456″ by far being the most popular password. There were several other instances where the numbers were reversed, or a few letters were added in a token effort to mix things up.

• 160: The number of times “111111″ is used as a password, which is only marginally better than a sequential list of numbers. The similarly creative “000000″ is used 71 times.

• 780: The number of times “password” was used as the password. Apparently, absolutely no thought went into security in these instances.

• 233: The number of times “password” was used in conjunction with a few numbers behind it. Apparently, the barest minimum of thoughts went into security here.

• 437: The number of times “welcome is used. With a password like that, you’re just asking to be hacked.

• 333: The number of times “ninja” is used. Pirates, unfortunately, didn’t make the list.

• 137,559: The number of Yahoo credentials that were leaked.

• 106,873: The number of Gmail credentials that were leaked. Hotmail, which was the next most frequently cited e-mail service, had fewer than half the number of users hit.

• 161: The number of times “freedom” is used, suggesting a lot of patriotic users. “America” was used 68 times.

• 161: The number of times the f-word is used in some combination. There are a lot of angry people out there.

• 133: The number of times “baseball” appears as a password. It’s the most popular sport on the list, proving that it is indeed America’s national past time. It just may not be the best password.

• 106: The number of times “superman” is used as a password. That’s nearly double the amount of times “batman” is used and triple the frequency of “spiderman.”

• 52: The number of times “starwars” is used. The force is not with this password.

• 32: The number of times “lakers” appears. It tied with “maverick,” although fortunately the Heat or Celtics weren’t on this list.

• 56: The number of times “winner” is used.

• 27: The number of times “ncc1701″ is used as a password.”

Of all these passwords, there are a few that I myself have been using, good thing that this came about to really wake me up.