Germany Urging Yahoo Users To Seek Alternative Email Providers

Several months ago, Yahoo revealed that they were hacked and about 500 million accounts were compromised. Then just the other day, the company disclosed that another 1 billion accounts separate of the 500 million accounts had also been hacked, which safe to say is pretty damning for the company.

So much so that over in Germany, the country’s cybersecurity authority, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) are now urging Yahoo users to switch to alternative email providers. According to BSI President Arne Schoenbohm, “Considering the repeated cases of data theft, users should look more closely at which services they want to use in the future and security should play a part in that decision.”

He also did not bother veiling his criticism of the company by adding, “There is an array of German email providers for whom security is not a foreign concept.” The BSI also pointed out that Yahoo’s use of the MD5 hash function to encrypt passwords is no longer considered to be state of the art security, and should be “regarded as unsafe”.

Things are certainly not looking up for the once-internet-darling. Verizon was on track to acquire the company, but following the latest hack it seems that Verizon could be considering taking back their offer.

Tyler Lee
Categories: General
Tags: Hack, Security, Yahoo