We have been advising our readers to stop using Yahoo because of the continue hacking of accounts. We have seen our friends and family members who were using Yahoo Mail and other Yahoo Services have their accounts compromised. Plus, we have read other stories about Yahoo’s aging infrastructure, poor management, disregard for user privacy and have seen first hand hundreds compromised Yahoo email accounts.
Yahoo doesn’t seem to take your privacy or security seriously. Yet they have the worst spam filters and censsorship of any of the major web mail services.
Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Outlook are far more secure than Yahoo – and we’ve been telling all of our readers this for several years. If you have a Yahoo account we strongly advise you to get a Gmail or Outlook.com account as soon as possible. We just don’t trust Yahoo.
However, if you’re still not convinced, there’s yet another story surfacing about compromised servers at Yahoo. Please read the article below, written by our friends at Emsisoft:
Researcher claims Yahoo! servers have been compromised using Shellshock
Early reports are indicating that at least two Yahoo! web servers have been hacked through use of the criticalShellshock Bash Bug.
Yahoo! has yet to release an official statement on the matter, however an analysis of the issue has been published by independent security researcher Jonathan Hall. According to Hall, Romanian hackers have used Shellshock to compromise the Yahoo! web servers and explore the company’s network. Hall writes that the attackers appear to be working towards accessing the Yahoo! Games servers, access which could potentially allow them to serve malware to millions of users. In addition to Yahoo!, the researcher also states that the hackers have compromised WinZip.com and Lycos.
As an immediate precaution, Emsisoft recommends that all Yahoo! users change their password as soon as Yahoo! confirms that the breach has been closed – that is, of course, if Hall’s findings are indeed true.
For more information, see the researcher’s statement and technical analysis.
Have a nice (malware-free) day!
I have friends who continue to use Yahoo email. One of them has had his own advertising company for many many years and Yahoo is his only email address and he relies on it for communicating and sending attachments to his contract customers.
For years I’ve been warning him. I simply can’t get him to change, even though I’ve sent him every “warning” article so he can read for himself. Plus I KNOW it has been hacked several times because of the phony emails that come to
me, appearing to be from him. It’s so bad that now when I see his name in the “from” field, I just delete it. I refuse to even open them. (I have eMClient installed on my computer and don’t want to risk opening mail I don’t trust.)
I dumped Yahoo years ago. Reading this made me think back to my experience with the internet years ago. I guess truth be told, it was over a decade ago. I remember ringing in 2000, after I Y2K-proofed my computer, lol. Sad that Yahoo has come to this. I remember when they were “all that and a bag of chips.” They even published a monthly print magazine, Yahoo Internet Life, or YIL for short. It was a great magazine, and I was sad when it folded, and when the change in the internet caused a lot of great sites and content to disappear. Well, Toto, I guess we aren’t in Kansas anymore.
I dumped Yahoo way back in the 90s when folks were telling me about mail they received from me… mail that I did not send. Much of it had to do with porn, and they knew I wouldn’t send it, knowingly anyway. True, I had gotten a virus, but it was Yahoo that had allowed me to get that invasion of my email program. It still didn’t sit too well with my tightly religious relatives and friends. When I tried to clean it out, all I did was move it around it seemed. I ended up replacing the PC rather than fight it anymore. I would hope that folks would pay heed to what TC has to say, as well as others. Roger
I had a Yahoo account that I kept only because it was the very first email account I had many moons ago. I rarely used it anymore, so after reading this article, I deleted the account. Thanks TC and EB for all you do for all of us out here in cyber space. You are appreciated more than you will ever know! 🙂
I have been using Yahoo email for the past 4 or5 years and have found it to be very satisfactory with no problems so far. Thanks for the warning anyhow.
I too have not had any issues with Yahoo that I get through my ATT account. I do also have a Gmail email address as well. Yahoo/ATT does filter Spam although one did get by the filter and I immediately put it in my Spam folder and deleted it.
Unfortunately Yahoo’s (ATT) spam filters are useless because they block good mail too. Week after week we deal with Yaho mail users who don’t get their newsletters because Yahoo simply deleted the mail – unlike Gmail or Outlook.com which give their users credit by allowing them to look at deleted mail to see if any of it’s good email placed in the spam folder…and then giving them the opportunity to mark the mail NOT SPAM so that mail from that sender is never placed in that folder again.
While Yahoo appears to have a similar feature, Yahoo summarily deletes emails it consider spam and the user is never even away of it.
Our friends, families, and many of our readers have had their accounts compromised and their email accounts use to send spam – some of it not very nice – and the Yahoo user was never aware that this garbage was being sent.
Yahoo has been a money-losing enterprise for as long as we can remember – it’s hard to believe that they have invested in a modernized infrastructure with modern safety and privacy protocols.
Maybe someday Yahoo Mail will catch up to Outlook.com and Gmail, but that day is not today.
Other than gmail are there any other web email sites that are trustworthy?
Outlook.com is very secure as well. For those who don’t like Google / Gmail, there’s Microsoft / Outlook.com.
We have seen too many of our readers, friends, and family members with Yahoo accounts who were compromised. There are better Web mail services out there – Outlook.com and Gmail being two of them.
Our skepticism about Yahoo began many years ago when we discovered the Yahoo Toolbar was malware – and still is.
If you’re not a Google fan, try Outlook.com by Microsoft. If you’re not a Microsoft fan, try Gmail 🙂