Millions of accounts hacked!!!!!! Panic on the streets!!!!! Seriously though, what did the hackers do (this happened in 2014, but only came to light now) with several trillion spam e-mails? What other value is there to Yahoo accounts? Vague personal details? Point being, people get all up in arms about online hacks, but most of them simply don't effect 99.999% of people.
You're wrong, and probably just oblivious. 500 million accounts. And that provides pretty great password resets to many many other accounts. Fun fact: to an identity the if, a valid email address/password is more valuable than cc info. That'll be discarded once after using. But after mining most email accounts, very often enough info can be gathered to open new accounts in your name. I recommended not using Yahoo at all. They have a history of being pretty loosely goosey with security.
My point is that there is next to nothing to steal in Yahoo accounts. Good luck to the hackers who want to "mine" through 500 million accounts.
i could probably be spoofed in a couple of places, but other then making people i've never met or heard of, hate my name, there really isn't much anyone could accomplish by doing so. simple reason, buying and selling on line i don't. likewise, most people with good sense don't keep or put personal information on line. of course people who weren't born before the internet might not think about it. thing is, if even the military and intellegence agencies can be hakked, and none of THEM are invulnerable either, its about using logical caution. webmail certianly isn't worse then pop-3 servers. if you buy everything on amazon and etsy, i can see where that might be a problem. there is, has never been, any such thing as a secure conversation that wasn't held in a bug free sound proofed room in a cave in the bottom of the ocean, or near the top of mt everist, with no one other then the two people engauged in it present.
So there are a few fundamental problems with it being a nation state as Yahoo claims. Primarily a nation state has nothing to gain from selling accounts, unless they're painfully hard up for cash (North Korea). Any other nation state actor would bulk mine them, and hold on to that asset until needed for more specific espionage. Money is to steal in 500 million accounts. Data mining can be automated, and whoever was selling them was selling them in bulk to people who were going to do just that. 15 million Americans have their identities fraudulently used for financial transactions annually. That's like 8% of Americans every year. Not .001%. Compare that to robbery, using 2010 statistics. 360,000 robberies. So you're about 50 times more likely to be a victim of cyber crime. The average loss in a robbery is $1,200 and for cyber crime it's $3,500. On the plus side almost nobody get's shot in a cyber crime. Email is as close to keys to your cyber identity as you have, Including anything you can do with it, often involving opening new accounts. People are making a big deal about it because It's a big deal.
its not hard to think of people who think they would bennifit from having you think it was a nation state. or even that some of them might do it just to have you think so. conspiracy theorists are capable of salting their own mine after all, and its my conspiracy theory that's the conspiracy theory that conspires to create conspiracy theories. internal errors can occur without external stimulus or culpable intent to. just two more possibilities that are just as likely as any other. maybe not more, but at least as much.
