Time to say cheerio to Yahoo

Smashing your own personal best may be good news for an Olympic athlete. But it’s very bad news if you’re a prominent email provider that has just announced another data breach, even more colossal than the last.

In December 2016, Yahoo confirmed it had been the victim of the “largest consumer hack ever” when one billion user accounts were compromised in an attack dating back to 2013. This announcement saw Yahoo beat its own world record which was a breach affecting 500 million users that occurred in 2014 (Yahoo actually admitted to this one before the 2013 attack, even though it occurred a year later).

It has been widely reported that names, phone numbers, email addresses and passwords were accessed during these attacks, although Yahoo maintains its users’ bank details were not. But it did confirm that cybercriminals responsible for the 2014 breach managed to access its code and figure out how to forge cookies, in order to target specific accounts.

That’ll do Yahoo

With Yahoo now facing strong criticism from even its most loyal supporters, we are recommending that if you still have an active Yahoo email account, either direct with Yahoo of via a partner such as AT&T, you delete it.

If you suspect that employees are still using their work PCs to access their own private Yahoo accounts during lunch breaks, you may wish to go a step further and consider blocking access to Yahoo’s site via your firewall. For more information, call our support team today.

Advice to Yahoo account owners

1. Make sure it’s gone – Before you delete your Yahoo account, ensure you delete all folders first. Only once you have erased all data within the account, should you delete the account itself.

2. Check all instances of your password – Have you being using your Yahoo password on other sites? If so, change the password and security questions for those accounts.

3. Beware of ‘Smishing’ attacks – If you provided your mobile phone details to Yahoo, and you are still using that number, you’re at a heightened risk of a ‘Smishing’ (SMS phishing) attack. Please remain vigilant and beware of suspicious-looking links contained within text messages.

Further articles from our Winter 2017 E-zine include:

• Cyber-crime and AI to dominate 2017 tech trends
• How to get the most out of Google Chrome
• 5 New malware threats every second
• Office 365 still the most secure option for SMEs