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:

[davester666]

No, they just store the credentials of all their users around the world in Japan.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it matter?

There are backdoors in all these online services (the Skype one is now confirmed [randombit.net], btw), If you trust any personal data to them, expect it to be shared.

Re:Yahoo has 22 million .jp users?

[hcs_$reboot]

Yahoo! Japan [wikipedia.org] (and its fellow Softbank) is incredibly popular in Japan, and plays a top role re Internet: ISP, search, mail, cell phones (SB)...
Question is "why?" Why Yahoo! (mail, search, ...) are still that popular? Why the Japanese didn't follow the Google trend (as much as the Western countries) during the mid 2000, where Yahoo! had (and still has [yahoo.co.jp]) those very busy pages and (for a long time) the search was of a much lower quality compared to Google, having a lot of results being sponsored by 3rd parties displayed on top without further indications about that sponsoring.
There is a technical answer: most PCs come with Yahoo! stuff, the search is set to Y! and nobody changes that. The thing is, compared to the West, the Japanese do not have that "pursuit of genuineness" reaction - they trust what is popular and Y! is very popular...
Furthermore, there is no strong consumer association in Japan, and abuses (in any field) may remain undisclosed for a long time (yes, there is a connection between Y! and abuses).

Re:Yahoo has 22 million .jp users?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Yahoo (back when they had their own independent search engine in Japan...they later switched to Bing and now I they're sadly using Google), Bing and others do not have this same issue nearly as badly as Google.

Plus Yahoo Japan actually has a pretty nice start page with access to dictionaries, etc.

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.

Re: Yahoo has 22 million .jp users?

[Brobock]

Have you tried google.com/ncr ?
This will do a no country redirect and you will get google proper no matter where you are.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

I have stayed both inside and outside Japan in the last few years.

My experience is that, the search results seem to depend on both your locale settings and your IP.

Can Google confirm this?

Re:

[flimflammer]

I have never experienced Google Japan returning Chinese sites regardless of characters I may be using, be it kanji, hiragana/katakana, or hell even english queries, and I have to frequently perform such queries...

Re:

[coalrestall]

I have Google set up to return English and Japanese results, and never had this specific problem, but two I do consistently get:

1) I search for something using English keywords, and the Japanese Wikipedia entry comes up (English entry nowhere in sight). That's probably Wikipedia's fault somehow. That, and

2) Whenever I search for anything that resembles a person's name (kanji) the first twenty odd results are name-based fortune telling sites.

Re:

[ikaruga]

There is a technical answer: most PCs come with Yahoo! stuff, the search is set to Y! and nobody changes that. The thing is, compared to the West, the Japanese do not have that "pursuit of genuineness" reaction - they trust what is popular and Y! is very popular...

Same in the west. Not only Google pays Mozilla and Apple to set their browsers default search engine to Google(let alone Chrome and Android influences) but they also got so integrated in society(To verb "to google" instead of "to search" being a primary example) that most people don't even bother searching for alternatives.

Re:

[TrollstonButterbeans]

most people don't even bother searching for alternatives.

Yahoo and Bing offer search results as impressive as Lycos, Hotbot and Altavista in the 1990s. In fact, as far as I can tell, Yahoo offers the same search results they did in the 1990s.

Bing could do a $100 million advertising campaign and it wouldn't help unless they take an interest in continually refining and improving their search results. No one "gave" the search engine market to Google, they slowly earned it.

Punctuation trap

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there anybody else that read at first the title as if "Yahoo!" and "Japan" were actually in separate sentences?

Being so glad about stolen user IDs seemed *really* weird.

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.

Re:And?

[Threni]

> So 20 million Yahoo user names are revealed. Why is that interesting at all?

This is almost as bad as the pin number leak the other week:

http://pastebin.com/2qbRKh3R [pastebin.com]

I've already changed my pin because of this; I guess a lot of Yahoo users will be changing their user names now.

Re:

[TrollstonButterbeans]

AT&T did a massive privacy violation and published a list of residential phone numbers complete with address.

Retitle "The UNtruth"

[ron-l-j]

"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." So yahoo is forced to disclose a data breach by law. But they add to it the nothing important was taken. I would like you to think for your self for a minute. Does a burglar go around robbing homeless peoples shopping carts? People go after what has value, and they stole something. This story should read Yahoo Japan tries desperate

The smell of bullshit.

[bmo]

"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."

There is so much bullshit here that you could grow world-class pumpkins that you need a crane to lift on to the flatbed truck (being careful, because it can crack under its own weight, *and then your fscked.).

Yahoo has been terrible at keeping control of this stuff, like the *other* massive leak they had just a year ago.

I used to be

not nice

[Wormsign]

"Yahoo! Japan May Have Had 22 Million User IDs Stolen" Why are you cheering for crime? ;)

Yaay another Marissa Mayer story for CNN

[gelfling]

Lean in, then fall in, on your ass.

darn

[slashmydots]

Boy, they should really leave Yahoo and hop on Tumblr instead. Oh wait...