Spark caught in massive Yahoo data breach

Spark says some of its customers’ data has been stolen as result of a massive hack on its email partner, Yahoo.

Yahoo announced on Thursday that as many as 500 million of its accounts had been compromised by a hack late in 2014, which it said had been sponsored by an unidentified foreign government.

Spark has about 450,000 customers for its email service which is outsourced to Yahoo but has not yet said whether all or only some may have been affected by the security breach.

Spokeswoman Michelle Baguley said Spark was working closely with Yahoo to identify the customers who might be affected, and it would contact them.

She advised Xtra email users to change their password and security questions for their email account and any online services for which they may have used the same credentials.

The information believed stolen in the attack includes names, email addresses and in some cases unencrypted security questions and answers that were designed to be used to help customers reset forgotten passwords.

These typically include answers to questions such as the name of your first school or car, or your pet.

The theft of the latter infor- mation could compromise other online services in cases where customers provided them with answers to the same security questions.

Spark said this month that it planned to switch all its email customers away from Yahoo to a new email system supplied by New Zealand company SMX.

The migration to SMX’s platform is due to begin in January and is expected to take three months.