Hackers hobble Telecom email service

Hackers hobble Telecom email service: Telecom’s email service, provided by global internet giant Yahoo, has been compromised by hackers for at least the fourth time in the last 12 months.

And Telecom says it has no idea how bad the latest attack might be, or where it’s coming from.

“At this point we don’t have confirmation of the cause or the scale of the problem,” the company told the New Zealand Herald.

“In the meantime our advice to customers is that they should mark suspicious looking emails as junk/spam and should never click on the links contained in them, even if the emails come from a known contact.”

The current problems surfaced at the end of last week, but have persisted through the weekend.

In January and February last year Telecom suffered what NetSafe called the biggest attack of its type to ever happen in New Zealand, with tens of thousands of New Zealanders’ email accounts hijacked to send out spam.

Another attack happened in April, a week after Telecom said it wouldn’t be ditching Yahoo as its email provider, and yet another in December.

“If a customer thinks that their Yahoo Xtra account may have been compromised – that is, if they think their account has been used to send spam – we advise them to change their password as soon as possible to re-secure the account,” a Telecom spokesperson said.

Affected users are urged to change their passwords as soon as possible.