Important security information for Xtra e-mail customers

26 September

Important security information for Xtra e-mail customers

Yahoo announced late last week that a copy of some of its user account information was stolen from the company’s global network back in November 2014. Yahoo has since confirmed that information from some of Spark’s Xtra customers is included in the stolen data.

Spark was notified on Friday and staff have been analysing the data provided by Yahoo to identify the Spark customers who Yahoo believe may be affected.

We take this matter very seriously and will be progressively communicating directly with these customers who may have been impacted, from today, and over the course of the next 48 hours. The number of email addresses potentially at risk is 130,000, which is around 15% of the total Xtra email address base.

Spark will be asking these customers to immediately change their passwords (if they haven’t already.)

Yahoo has told Spark it has no evidence that the stolen information has been used to gain unauthorised access to Spark accounts.

To maintain a secure online profile, Spark advises all Xtra users to regularly update account settings with a strong, difficult-to-predict password. All Xtra customers who have not changed their password since 2014, or are unsure if they have, should do so now on the Spark website using this link: www.spark.co.nz/changepassword.

As previously announced, we are currently in the process of preparing to move all of our email systems back home to New Zealand. If customers have already registered to have their email moved to SMX, they don’t need to do that again. Similarly if customers have changed their password as part of the SMX registration process they won’t need to do it again.

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