How to Regain Control of a “Hacked” Yahoo Messenger Account

August 7, 2006 · Filed Under Media Players, Miscellaneous tips

This incident happened to my friends’ Yahoo Messenger (YM) account. She logged-on to her Yahoo Messenger account in an Internet café, typing her username and password they way that she were to use it at home.

Now, she casually logged-on to Yahoo messenger, not noticing that the “Remember My ID and Password” field and “Sign-in Automatically” was checked. She went on with her Instant Messaging session, then payed her bill and off she goes.

Nothing unsual, you may think. Wrong! What happens next is that the next customer, upon logging on the computer that you have used, is now automatically logged-in to your Yahoo Messenger account (remember that the remember my ID and password field was selected).

Now, the “stranger” who has now complete control of my friends’ Yahoo Messenger account is bothering everyone on her contacts, and that includes me.

I immediately notified my friend thru SMS that “someone” is using her account and got confirmation that the account was indeed “hacked”.

Since she is on the road and have no immediate access to a computer, she asked for my assistance to regain control of her Yahoo messenger account.

I wasted no time and immediately clicked on “My account info” tab (see picture on the right) on my Yahoo messenger. Upon clicking this tab, you will be bought to a page shown below:

Upon seeing the page shown above, enter your friends’ Yahoo ID and Password (of course, your friend has to give you her credentials since she is asking for your help, right?).

Now, you may be wondering why not just you log-out of your Yahoo Messenger account then log-in using your friends’ account? That would give you control of your friends’ account. Well, there’s a bit of truth value in that since you cannot log-on with the same credentials on different computers. That scenario would “kick-out” one user. However, since my friends’ credentials was saved in the other computer, we would end up in a never-ending cycle of account “gain and re-gain”.

Now back to Yahoo’s credential page, by now, I assume that you have entered your friends’ username and password. Did so? Great!

You should be seeing the window as shown below:

Immediately change the password to a different one. Then save your settings. After doing this, log-out of of Yahoo Messenger account and log-in to your friends’ account using the new password.

After doing this, you are assured that you will “boot-out” the stranger out of your friends’ Yahoo Messenger account.

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2 Responses to “How to Regain Control of a “Hacked” Yahoo Messenger Account”

Jo Beth on June 25th, 2008 2:44 pm

My yahoo account has been hacked….whoever hacked my account changed my birthdate and security question….How on earth can I get this back…Yahell’s assistants tell me this can not be done…We all know they don’t know what they are talking about…I know somewhere out there someone knows how I can recover my account that I have had for 6 years…HELP!!!!!!!!
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Arthur on June 25th, 2008 10:45 pm

Originally Posted By Jo Beth
My yahoo account has been hacked….whoever hacked my account changed my birthdate and security question….How on earth can I get this back…Yahell’s assistants tell me this can not be done…We all know they don’t know what they are talking about…I know somewhere out there someone knows how I can recover my account that I have had for 6 years…HELP!!!!!!!!

Hi,

It seems to me that whoever hacked your Yahoo account knows a great deal about you. Did you left your account logged in at some public internet place?

If you were to ask me, those “remember me” or “keep me signed-in” options poses a great security risk to sensitive accounts like IM and email. Those options should be removed. It is way easy to log-in again that recover something that is hacked already.

Sadly, I have to agree with Yahell’s assistants. Recovering from such incident wherein your security details have been changed seems next to impossible. Just be careful next time. Don’t forget to log-off your account, even if you are using a private computer.
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