You may or may not have heard but Yahoo has been in the news quite a bit. First they were being sold to Verizon for 4.8 billion dollars. This was no surprise to people that follow technology because Yahoo has been doing poorly in the last couple years despite acquiring other companies, investments, and changes to the company. Verizon bought Yahoo because they have a lot of online advertisement revenue and technology patents.
Many technology reporters have disliked Yahoo's website, search, and e-mail for sometime. The reason for this dislike was that the company has paid associate and referral payments to companies that sent them users despite many of those companies doing so through malicious and illegal means such as malware, ad ware, and deceptive software downloads.
News recently came out that Yahoo's e-mail system was hacked and 500 million users accounts were affected. It is unclear how long Yahoo knew this occurred but the breach was from 2014 and they just notified the public last month. This Business Insider article claims that the real number of affected accounts is probably closer to one billion http://www.businessinsider.com/yahoo-insider-hacking-2016-9?r=UK&IR=T and this article discusses who may have pulled off this massive hackhttp://fortune.com/2016/09/29/yahoo-hacked-by-eastern-european-gang-cybersecurity-firm-says/
Then just a few weeks after this happened an insider at Yahoo discussed that the National Security Agency or Federal Bureau of Investigation asked for a real time filter of all e-mails to find and record suspect conversations (Here is a New York Time article discussing it: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/06/technology/yahoo-email-tech-companies-government-investigations.html?_r=0 ) . It turned out that it was much worse, there was a 'rootkit' on Yahoo's system which may have allowed government employees access to any and all communications that were being made on Yahoo's system http://motherboard.vice.com/read/yahoo-government-email-scanner-was-actually-a-secret-hacking-tool
Why does this all matter to you?
Many articles from technology publications and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have asked that users close their accounts with Yahoo. They say this because Yahoo has not taken security seriously and not protected its users information from the government or from outside bad actors.
While I think that everyone who has a Yahoo account should immediately change their password; I do not think that you should delete your account and the reason that I say that is because Yahoo recycles e-mail addresses. If you have 'ABC123@yahoo.com' and you go delete your account then in 6 months Yahoo will make 'ABC123@yahoo.com' available for someone else. If you fail to inform everyone from your family and friends to that website that sends you reset codes to change your password, it means that someone else will have that e-mail address and may get an e-mail that was intended for you.
If you have an account with Yahoo change the password and try to change all your accounts that have a Yahoo e-mail address as the username / contact to another provider. I have had one employee and a few patrons that have had people try to get into their Apple account, Facebook account, or receive text messages that were "phishing". In one case a patron was called and told that they had been "hacked" and that they needed to purchase protection or assistance. Luckily that patron called me and we were able to determine that this was a scam.
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