Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! 'state! hackers!' Hackers strongly believed to be state-sponsored swiped account records for 500 million or more Yahoo! webmail users. And who knew there were that many people using its email? The troubled online giant said on Thursday that the break-in occurred in late 2014, and that names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, …
"names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, were lifted."
Hmm, my yahoo e-mail address is already in the public domain on account of me giving it to other people so that they can e-mail me. If you know my name (which is in my e-mail address), then getting my DOB isn't too difficult; but that was my bad, not Yahoo's
Are anybody's e-mail providers safe? Fact is, if you want to do anything online you need e-mail, and I think yahoo are as on the ball as anyone when it comes to security, so I'm staying with them.
Having seen this on the news I logged into yahoo.co.uk to change my password, to be told by the ever helpful Firefox that they don't have a valid certificate for https://uk.mg40.mail.yahoo.com. Fortunately I only use it to soak up junk mail from Facebook and Linkedin, so I guess it doesn't matter that much.
Didn't yahoo make everyone change their password in the past year?
I copied and pasted my old password into the New Password box and Yahoo email was quite happy to accept it. Wonderful security. My Yahoo account is 20 years old and while I don't use if much I do prefer their interface to that abortion Gmail uses.
Guess I really should change the password to something different, after all a password should not be 20 years old too. But then again, I only use that password on that site, in fact every site I logon to has a unique password. I'm old so I have an excuse to be stupid and lazy.
Apart from the huge list of "compliments" - including destroying a bunch of other working companies and giving it's failure of a CEO the biggest bonus of her lifetime... Notice how this came to light AFTER the Verizon deal.
Naturally if it did come out before, V would have bought them for nothing more than 25 cents. And who wants a 25 cent company that pays 40 million $ to its CEO???
Ans: Verizon!! (you thought this was gonna be "Yahoo" didnt you :P
Thing is, the deal wasn't CLOSED yet (the deal been declared but not tendered), so by doing this now they've practically torpedoed the deal, as Verizon IINM is still in a position to back out. Because both companies are public, the deal also has to be cleared by the SEC as well. Indeed, withholding the breach for as long as this could run afoul of disclosure and fiduciary duty laws.
At the risk of beating a dead horse, BT has posted this on their website,
" At BT, we take the security of our customers’ data and information extremely seriously.
You may have seen that overnight Yahoo! announced that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from its company’s network in late 2014. Yahoo! is the provider of some of BT’s customers email accounts and we are urgently investigating this with them.
If you were a BT Yahoo email account holder in 2014 and haven’t reset your password since then, as a precaution we advise that you change your passwords online and follow good password management practices."
So most likely BT's yahoo provided accounts are compromised too. I'm off to find someone else to host my email.
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