Yahoo and AOL are part of Verizon's new 'Oath' brand

On Monday, Business Insider reported a scoop: that after Verizon completes its acquisition of Yahoo, AOL and Yahoo “plan to call themselves by a new name” and that the new name is Oath. AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who oversees the media division that will include Yahoo after the acquisition closes, subsequently confirmed the Oath name with a tweet.

But the headlines about this news have been extremely misleading. “Say goodbye to AOL and Yahoo,” reads a headline at The Week. “Yahoo to be renamed Oath,” says a headline at The Hollywood Reporter. Those are incorrect.

Yahoo, the media brand so many consumers know, that includes Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Yahoo News, and other verticals, is not going away.

Oath is simply the name Verizon has chosen for the media division that will house Yahoo’s media sites, AOL (including TechCrunch and Engadget) and Huffington Post.

www.yahoo.com

When is a Yahoo account not a Yahoo account? When it's a BT/Sky/etc... one!

The fallout continues from the huge Yahoo data breach affecting 500 million accounts -  various other companies provide email using Yahoo's services. 

For example BT and Sky. So if your email account is from BT or Sky, your security may well have been compromised.

It is time to leave Yahoo mail behind. I strongly recommend moving to Gmail.

If you have a Yahoo account, as a minimum:

Change your Yahoo password.

Make sure that you haven't used the same password anywhere else.

 Yahoo has admitted that security questions and answers have also been grabbed by the hackers, you should be careful to ensure that they don't also come back to haunt you.

It's easy to imagine how a hacker could - perhaps with a little dab of social engineering - try to use the answers to secret questions to trick other online services into providing them access to accounts.

The End of Yahoo: Marissa Mayer To Resign; Yahoo To Change Its Name To Altaba

Marissa Mayer, the CEO of perennial drain-circler Yahoo!, will step down from its board of directors, along with five other members, after Verizon finishes gobbling up most of the internet portal.

And once the acquisition is over, the remaining carcass of Yahoo! will change its name to Altaba Inc.

In an SEC filing today, Yahoo! stated that once the Verizon takeover is complete – presumably after the US telco haggles Yahoo! down from its $4.8bn price tag following some serious brand tarnishing – Mayer will quit Yahoo!'s board of directors.

www.theregister.co.uk

It's time to close your Yahoo account

"Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter."

If true, then the advice for the privacy-conscious is clear: close down your Yahoo account.

After all, how could you ever trust Yahoo again?

PS: Here is how you delete your Yahoo account.
www.grahamcluley.com

www.reuters.com

Yahoo Suffers World's Biggest Hack Affecting 1 Billion Users

Yahoo has discovered a 3-year-old security breach that enabled a hacker to compromise more than 1 billion user accounts, breaking the company's own humiliating record for the biggest security breach in history.

The digital heist disclosed Wednesday occurred in August 2013, more than a year before a separate hack that Yahoo announced nearly three months ago . That breach affected at least 500 million users, which had been the most far-reaching hack until the latest revelation.

Both lapses occurred during the reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, a once-lauded leader who found herself unable to turn around the company in the four years since her arrival. Earlier this year, Yahoo agreed to sell its digital operations to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion — a deal that may now be imperiled by the hacking revelations.

abcnews.go.com

ICO slaps Yahoo! with £250k fine for 2014 data breach

Yahoo!'s UK limb has finally been handed a £250,000 fine for the 2014 cyber attack that exposed data of half a million Brit users.

Russian hackers broke into Yahoo!'s servers and slurped info on circa 500 million international account holders, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates, hashed passwords and encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

Despite evidence that the firm knew about the mega-hack soon after it happened at the end of 2014, Yahoo! kept quiet until September 2016. Since then, the fines and court cases have kept rolling in as various regulators get in on the action.

Today, the Information Commissioner's Office issued Yahoo! UK Services Ltd a £250,000 fine following an investigation that focused on the 515,121 UK accounts that the London-based branch of the firm had responsibility for.

www.theregister.co.uk

Using the Win10 Yahoo Mail App? Time for a "Plan B"

Users of the Windows 10 Yahoo Mail app have begun receiving notifications within the app, informing them that the app will cease to work on May 22nd, just a few days from now.

The Windows Store listing for the Yahoo Mail app is still online but the ability to download it has been removed. In addition to this, a large number of users have begun reporting on Twitter that the app has already stopped working for them ahead of the cut-off which suggests that support for it has already begun to cease at least partially.

Generally using the words "email" and "Yahoo" in the same sentence is a bad idea. Do yourself a favour and move to Gmail.

www.onmsft.com

Yahoo confirms huge data breach affecting 500 million accounts.

A recent investigation by Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network.

www.businesswire.com

Yahoo to pay $50M and other costs for massive security breach

Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damages and provide two years of free credit-monitoring services to 200 million people whose email addresses and other personal information were stolen as part of the biggest security breach in history.

The restitution hinges on federal court approval of a settlement filed late Monday in a 2-year-old lawsuit seeking to hold Yahoo accountable for digital burglaries that occurred in 2013 and 2014, but weren't disclosed until 2016.

It adds to the financial fallout from a security lapse that provided a mortifying end to Yahoo's existence as an independent company and former CEO Marissa Mayer's six-year reign.

www.abcnews.go.com

Yahoo’s billion-user database reportedly sold on the Dark Web for just $300,000

Yahoo, which admitted to two separate breaches that saw 500 million users’ and then 1 billion users’ details stolen by hackers – the New York Times reports that a billion-user database was sold on the Dark Web last August for $300,000.

That’s according to Andrew Komarov, chief intelligence office at security firm InfoArmor. He told NYT that three buyers, including two prominent spammers and another who might be involved in espionage tactics purchased the entire database at the aforementioned price from a hacker group believed to based in Eastern Europe.

It’s lovely to know that it only costs $300,000 to be able to threaten a billion people’s online existence – which means each account is only worth $0.0003 to hackers who can ruin your life online in a matter of minutes.

Yahoo also doesn’t yet know who made off with all the data from the attack in 2013, which is said to be the largest breach of any company ever.

In addition to full names, passwords, birth dates and phone numbers, the database also contains security questions and backup email addresses that could help with resetting forgotten passwords.

www.thenextweb.com

Iranian phishers bypass 2fa protections offered by Yahoo Mail and Gmail

A recent phishing campaign targeting US government officials, activists, and journalists is notable for using a technique that allowed the attackers to bypass two-factor authentication protections offered by services such as Gmail and Yahoo Mail, researchers said Thursday. The event underscores the risks of 2fa that relies on one-tap logins or one-time passwords, particularly if the latter are sent in SMS messages to phones.

Attackers working on behalf of the Iranian government collected detailed information on targets and used that knowledge to write spear-phishing emails that were tailored to the targets’ level of operational security, researchers with security firm Certfa Lab said in a blog post. The emails contained a hidden image that alerted the attackers in real time when targets viewed the messages. When targets entered passwords into a fake Gmail or Yahoo security page, the attackers would almost simultaneously enter the credentials into a real login page. In the event targets’ accounts were protected by 2fa, the attackers redirected targets to a new page that requested a one-time password.

“In other words, they check victims’ usernames and passwords in realtime on their own servers, and even if 2 factor authentication such as text message, authenticator app or one-tap login are enabled they can trick targets and steal that information too,” Certfa Lab researchers wrote.

www.arstechnica.com

Yahoo "expected to confirm massive data breach"

Yahoo is poised to confirm a massive data breach of its service, according to several sources close to the situation, hacking that has exposed several hundred million user accounts.

While sources were unspecific about the extent of the incursion, since there is the likelihood of government investigations and legal action related to the breach, they noted that it is widespread and serious.

Earlier this summer, Yahoo said it was investigating a data breach in which hackers claimed to have access to 200 million user accounts and was selling them online. “It’s as bad as that,” said one source. “Worse, really.”

www.recode.net

Yahoo could have reset all user passwords two years ago, but chose not to...

...Ms. Mayer also rejected the most basic security measure of all: an automatic reset of all user passwords, a step security experts consider standard after a breach. Employees say the move was rejected by Ms. Mayer’s team for fear that even something as simple as a password change would drive Yahoo’s shrinking email users to other services...

www.grahamcluley.com

Yahoo's 2013 hack impacted all of it's 3 billion accounts

Last year Yahoo (now part of Oath along with AOL after its acquisition by Verizon) announced that back in 2013, hackers had stolen info covering over one billion of its accounts. 

Today, the combined company announced that further investigation reveals the 2013 hack affected all of its accounts that existed at the time: about three billion. 

The information taken "may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers."

www.engadget.com

Issues with Microsoft Outlook? You're not alone...

Microsoft is investigating several issues causing email synchronization and connection problems when using the classic Outlook desktop client.

• The first bug causes "Can't connect to the server" errors when creating groups in classic Outlook when Exchange Web Services (EWS) is enabled for the tenant.
• The other known issue is triggering 0x800CCC0F and 0x80070057 when synchronizing Gmail and Yahoo accounts in classic Outlook. (Donline is seeing several instances of this issue)

The Outlook team is working to identify the root cause of this known issue and will share more details once a fix is available.

www.bleepingcomputer.com

The pros & cons of "remote working"

If there’s a phrase likely to get some managers twitchier than ‘remote working’, I’m yet to hear it. Despite 1.5 million people in the UK taking advantage of some form of remote or flexible working, many businesses still aren’t open to it. In the anti-remote work camp is, most notably, Yahoo. CEO Marissa Mayer caused international uproar when she threw the gauntlet down against remote working back in 2013. Big organisations like Reddit and IBM followed suit, creating policies against remote working and calling employees back into the office.

While the headline-hitting moves seem controversial, in reality, they aren’t. 47% of UK businesses don’t encourage any form of flexible working. Yet 4 million UK workers wish they could work at home at least one day a week. And 70% say it makes a job more attractive. So why aren’t more businesses taking advantage of it? Read more here.

www.microsoft.com

Fed up with airlines not giving enough legroom? How about none?...

Budget airline VivaColombia is considering plans to remove all seats from its planes and make passengers stand.

They hope the move will drive down fares by allowing them to squeeze more passengers into each flight, opening up air travel to working class Colombians and budget holidaymakers.

The no-frills carrier announced this week that it is adding 50 new Airbus 320s to its fleet to capitalise on the country's growing tourist market. The new planes will have more seats and lower running costs with the first one going into service at the start of 2018.

VivaColombia’s founder and CEO William Shaw told the Miami Herald the airline was looking into vertical travel options. He said: “There are people out there right now researching whether you can fly standing up – we’re very interested in anything that makes travel less expensive.”

He added: “Who cares if you don’t have an inflight entertainment system for a one-hour flight? Who cares that there aren’t marble floors… or that you don’t get free peanuts?”

www.yahoo.com

'Very high level of confidence' Russia used Kaspersky software for devastating NSA leaks

Three months after U.S. officials asserted that Russian intelligence used popular antivirus company Kaspersky to steal U.S. classified information, there are indications that the alleged espionage is related to a public campaign of highly damaging NSA leaks by a mysterious group called the Shadow Brokers.

U.S. investigators “now believe that those manuals [leaked by Shadow Brokers] may have been obtained using Kaspersky to scan computers on which they were stored.”

www.yahoo.com

Scott Adams, Creator of the ‘Dilbert’ Comic Strip, Dies at 68

Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, before racist remarks got him pink-slipped, died Tuesday. He was 68.

His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. “I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer,” he said.

In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, “Things did not go well for me … my body fell before my brain.”

Sprung from Adams’ days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million.

Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.

I've been a massive Dilbert fan for ~25 years. Scott - thanks for all the laughs. Rest in God's peace bud. x

www.yahoo.com

Let's take a bad thing & make it worse: Windows 10 Mail, now with added Ads!

Microsoft was, and maybe still is, considering injecting targeted adverts into the Windows 10 Mail app.

The ads would appear at the top of inboxes of folks using the client without a paid-for Office 365 subscription, and the advertising would be tailored to their interests. Revenues from the banners were hoped to help keep Microsoft afloat, which banked just $16bn in profit in its latest financial year.

According to Aggiornamenti Lumia on Friday, folks using Windows Insider fast-track builds of Mail and Calendar, specifically version 11605.11029.20059.0, may have seen the ads in among their messages, depending on their location. Users in Brazil, Canada, Australia, and India were chosen as guinea pigs for this experiment.

A now-deleted FAQ on the Office.com website about the "feature" explained the advertising space would be sold off to help Microsoft "provide, support, and improve some of our products," just like Gmail and Yahoo! Mail display ads.

The Win10 Mail app sucks - do yourself a favour & use Webmail or Outlook!

www.theregister.co.uk