Yahoo! Japan May Have Had 22 Million User IDs Stolen

hypnosec writes with report of the possible theft of up to 22 million user IDs revealed by Yahoo! Japan. That scale is massive, but, he writes, "According to Yahoo, the information that was stolen didn't have passwords or any other information that would allow unauthorized users to carry out user identity verification." A story at the Japan Times adds a bit more detail.

Re:Yahoo has 22 million .jp users?

[ikaruga]

Also, Google Japan is abysmal. You can set Google's language settings to "Japanese only", but you enter your search term in kanji, you inevitably end up getting back mostly Chinese hits. You have to add a hiragana character (I usually use hiragana "no") to your search term to get back Japanese hits.

I've been living in Japan since 2006 and never experienced this. Google Japan will return Japanese sites. It doesn't matter if I write in Kanji, Kana or any western Alphabet. My only complaint is when I'm looking for information in English(mostly programming stuff), I need to manually set up my Google settings to english both for language and locale, otherwise I will still get Japanese pages(and now that they decide to auto translate everything things got even worse). But for the average Japanese, I see no problem at all.

And?

[dshk]

So 20 million Yahoo user names are revealed. Why is that interesting at all? I guess if I write a script which loops some id for a yahoo info page I get a similar list. Maybe a Google search is enough. Or do not contact external service, just guess: take all Japanese names, append one or two digits to it. Mostly these are valid names.