Almost half a million passwords belonging to users of Yahoo Voices – a platform for making low-cost PC to PC calls worldwide – have been compromised and posted online.

The security of the service was breached early this morning, with a list titled “Owned and Exposed” posted online along with the message “brought to you by the D33Ds Company”. Within the document are a number of details for the service, including all of the email addresses and passwords for the 450,000 users of Yahoo Voices.

Access to this pillaged information is patchy, with the site hosting the exposed date being intermittently down, however Mashable say they were able to open the document and verify that Yahoo Voices users’ email and password data can indeed be found within.

While personal information held in servers is often targeted for means of malevolent financial gain, the group behind this breach explain their actions at the end of the document:

“We hope that the parties responsible for managing the security of this subdomain will take this as a wake-up call, and not as a threat. There have been many security holes exploited in webservers belonging to Yahoo! Inc. that have caused far greater damage than our disclosure. Please do not take them lightly. The subdomain and vulnerable parameters have not been posted to avoid further damage.”

Are you one of the 450,000 users affected by the Yahoo Voice security breach? How do you think Yahoo should react? Another more general question might be whether or not we, as a community of internet users, should be thankful that there are people out there championing the cause for tighter and more robust security? If not for groups pointing out the fallibility of current systems, would the companies that hold our data just carry on sailing blindly into the night?