Yahoo Inc. announced Jan. 30 that its customer’s email accounts were compromised in a recent cyber-attack. Yahoo claimed the attackers used credentials obtained from another company’s user database in an attempt to access the email accounts.
In late January, Yahoo’s senior vice president Jay Rossiter said in a blog post that there had been no evidence that the compromise came directly from Yahoo’s systems.
Rossiter said in his blog that Yahoo sent email notifications and text messages to inform those whose accounts were affected.
Chepkoech L. Milly, sophomore nursing major at California Baptist University, said she had been a recipient of one of the mass email notifications. Milly said she had trouble logging onto her Yahoo account the weekend of Jan. 25-26.
Milly said she was frustrated because she could not acess her homework assignment saved in her Yahoo email. Because she had personal information and documentation also saved under her Yahoo account, she feared that the hackers would have access to the information.
For future protection, Rossiter wrote, “Using the same password on multiple sites or services makes users particularly vulnerable to these types of attacks.”
Regarding a more secure password, Milly recommended using both an uppercase and lowercase letter along with numerals and symbols. She also recommended changing passwords at least every three months.
Last December, Yahoo went down for several days, causing more than a million users to go without email access. Yahoo informed customers that their Yahoo Mail outage had been caused by a hardware problem in one of the company’s mail-data centers.
Because of these problems with Yahoo and recommendations from friends, Milly decided to create a Gmail account.
Delena Ahumada, freshman music major, agreed that every Yahoo customer should consider changing their service provider because of that provider’s consistent problems.
“I have never had problems with Gmail before, but I also know that my mom had Yahoo and it gave her a virus (and) a lot of junk mail,” Ahumada said. “With Gmail, a lot of the spam goes to the junk mail, whereas for Yahoo it did not.”
Ahumada said Gmail provides user-friendly benefits such as FaceTime, a free texting app and fast service. However, she suggested that students should use their LancerMail account specifically for saving their homework assignments.
