After Two Massive Attacks, Is It Time To Put Yahoo To Rest?

There aren’t a lot of companies that can lose details for more than a billion accounts. There are only a handful of tech companies with that many users in the first place, so you’d expect this elite club of multi-billion dollar tech giants to have better safeguards.

Unfortunately, Yahoo isn’t as quick or agile as the other tech companies. While Google and Apple have each been attacked in the past, they’ve moved to patch things up quickly and limit their losses. Yahoo, on the other hand, decided to move away from MD5 encryption in 2013, five years after security experts at Carnegie Mellon University’s Software Engineering Institute had discredited it and called it “cryptographically broken.”

Not one, but two Yahoo Attacks

The failure to secure systems fast enough has resulted in two of the biggest data breaches in history. In late 2014, the company lost account details for half a billion users. Nearly 500 million people using the site were asked to change their security questions and passwords following the announcement. At the time, it was the largest corporate cyber attack.

Not long after, Yahoo was forced to admit that it had lost details for a billion accounts in a separate attack in August 2013. Both attacks were based on the inherent weakness of the MD5 encryption Yahoo was using. It’s unfortunate that a company that was once synonymous with web search is now a case study for bad data practice.

Other services are not much better

Other mainstream email providers may not be much better. Apple lost nearly 40 million users’ details and photos when its iCloud servers were breached. Hundreds of millions of accounts from Google and Microsoft were also compromised over the past few years. If you use any one of the many mainstream service providers your chances of getting hacked are nearly one in three. According to the National Cyber Security Alliance, every small business faces a one-in-five chance of getting hacked in any given year.

The problem seems to be that large corporation move too slowly to tackle data theft appropriately. Large, mainstream platforms struggle to detect and deal with vulnerabilities before hackers can exploit them. Hacking mainstream servers is also a lot more lucrative. The immense volume makes big corporations a prime target for such attacks.

How to secure your data

The only way to safely secure your data, files, emails, and messages is to use a platform that offers better protection. Secure Swiss Data offers end-to-end encryption on all data that is safely stored in Swiss datacenters. The accounts are further secured by two-step verification and the most sophisticated encryption techniques in the industry.

It’s the perfect time to delete your mainstream account and sign up to a more secure platform that takes your personal and business privacy seriously.