Yahoo Cybersecurity Breach

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The article titled “Yahoo says 1 billion user accounts were hacked,” published on December 14, 2016, was written by Vindu Goel and Nicole Perlroth. Vindu Goel and Nicole Perlroth are technology reporters for The New York Times, an American daily newspaper founded in New York City. This newspaper has been published since September 18, 1851. The New York Times has also won 117 Pulitzer prizes, which is more than any other news organization. The authors’ primary message in this article is that Yahoo recently disclosed that a cybersecurity attack in 2013 compromised over one billion user accounts. The authors’ write that “Yahoo, already reeling from its September disclosure that 500 million user accounts had been hacked in 2014, disclosed …show more content…

Yahoo recently disclosed the information that an attack in 2013 comprised the information in over one billion user accounts. Another attack in 2014 comprised over 500 million user accounts. The authors believe that what’s most troubling in this is that Yahoo had never anticipated a cybersecurity breach at the time. Jay Kaplan, the chief executive of Synack, a security company, thinks that “Yahoo has a long way to go to catch up to these threats.” Yahoo also reported that the hackers behind this breach most likely used web cookies, which allowed the hackers to access an account without a username or password. A web cookie is a small piece of data sent from a website and stored on the user's computer by the user's web browser while the user is …show more content…

Other email providers such as Gmail are much more safe and reliable. For example, Gmail boasts an HTTPS (encryption), protection against malware and phishing (scams), the best anti-spam shield, and a two-step user authentication feature. On the flip side, Yahoo’s security program includes only “the best” anti-spam features. This information alone convinces me thata other email providers such as Gmail are much more reliable in terms of internet security. Because of this, I believe that Yahoo accounts are not safe to own. I also believe that Yahoo falls behind other popular email providers in terms of internet