Is Yahoo Mail Secure Enough To Be Trusted? Is Any Internet Based Email Secure?
[Reblogged from subzinfo]
I received a surprise text message recently. The text didn’t really say anything special actually just a few words a hyperlink. What was the surprise then, you say? The surprise was that the text came from my own yahoo email account.
This makes two of my yahoo accounts in less than a month that have been compromised. The first incident happened the second week in March. I received a text from a family member stating that my email account may have been hacked. When I opened the email account in question I found two and a half pages of bounced [undeliverable] email notices. Tsk,tsk this isn’t looking good.
I use my email accounts like work desks. Each one serves a different purpose and they are all active so initially my assumption was that I’ve somehow been careless. Perhaps I’ve allowed some type of virus to reside on computer and steal password information. Or better still, perhaps I’ve left an unsecured thumbdrive with my login info laying around [yeah that must be it, I thought]. If so, then changing login information should be a simple enough fix for all of this. Right?….WRONG!!
Upon closer examination of my “sent” box I noticed that there was no record of my account of sending any mail that resembled spam to anyone. How could this be if I have so many “undeliverable” email notices bouncing back to me? A good ole google search with keywords “yahoo mail security breach” produced some interesting leads. It seems that hackers have been abusing lapses in yahoo’s security for months. One article even points the finger at wordpress. It seems that customers all over the world are having the same problem as me.
Check out these articles for more information:
- Eight-month WordPress flaw responsible for Yahoo mail breach: Bitdefender
- http://www.zdnet.com/eight-month-wordpress-flaw-responsible-for-yahoo-mail-breach-bitdefender-7000010658/
- BT investigates spike in Yahoo! email spamming
- http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/9918214/BT-investigates-spike-in-Yahoo-email-spamming.html
- Spammers breach security to hijack email accounts
- http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10864612
Now that I have some insight my concern is beginning to grow. I noticed that my GMAIL account has been prompting me to add some new security features and now I know why. It doesn’t seem that yahoo mail is very secure these days and I suppose any other email provider could be just as vulnerable.
I was dismayed to find out that the U.S. Government has access to my emails and now it seems there are unregulated spammers out there who may access my account at will as well. That’s just friggin’ awesome.
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