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Wed, 10th Apr 2013
FYI, this story is more than a year old

In a worrying case of deja vu, Telecom has revealed that Yahoo Xtra email users are once again under attack.

Following past controversies, where over 60,000 email accounts were affected, the email service is back under the spotlight, with reports of suspicious emails containing only a website link circulating yesterday afternoon.

Telecom says they are working on the issue however, but past problems will no doubt make users wary of a quick-fix.

"We are aware of a small number of incidents where customers have received spam through their Yahoo Xtra email account," said Lucy Jackson, Telecom spokeswoman.

"We're not sure of the extent of the problem and so we are working with Yahoo to investigate.

"At this point it isn’t nearly of the scale that we saw in February and we are pleased to see that the processes we’ve put in place with Yahoo to manage any incidents of spam have worked very well in the past 24 hours.

"We advise any customers who have received mail that they believe is spam, even from a known contact, to delete immediately and never to click on suspicious links contained within emails."

In a week where the telco renewed its commitment to Yahoo's email service, the company will be hoping the setback is minimal, for risk of further repercussions from disgruntled users.

“All email providers are engaged in a continuous battle against online crime and spam,” said Chris Quin, CEO, Telecom Retail earlier this week.

“Yahoo, as one of the biggest global providers of email, is at the frontline of this battle – they alone block more than 600 billion spam messages a month."

Yet, thankfully, nothing so far suggests the attack is widespread and dangerous but the telco did advise users to change their passwords as a matter of precaution.

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