Yahoo Hacked: Search Site May Have Been the Latest to Experience Security Breach

I got home from work yesterday and saw an email in my inbox. I realize that an inbox is supposed to hold emails but this one was a bit unique in that it was sent from a friend with a really odd link. Naturally, I didn’t click on the link.  Instead, I notified the sender who stated, “Oh my gawd, I’ve been hacked!”

For years, companies have pushed for efficiencies and left all best practices (formerly known as standards) at the door to save costs. This, combined with numerous coding advances and smart criminals, have left many wondering if any account is safe.  Apparently, Yahoo is not immune from cyber attacks. What they are immune to is customer feedback.

Out of frustration, a phone number was found and no one at the end of the line. The help email was pretty much worthless and password reset attempts came up with the following message:

The next step was to find the “What to do” page for compromised accounts. Here we discovered that Yahoo is “experiencing an unusually high volume of support inquiries at this time ….”

Further searches turned up a non-Yahoo owned customer feedback site with a few unhappy customers. It also showed that this may be an ongoing problem. On Tuesday (2/19) AJ wrote that he/she has been trying to get the problem rectified for a few days: “I've been having the same issues as some of these people couple days ago I've been locked out of my email I end up changing the password two days later i'm locked out again this time to get back in it asked for security questions I entered the answer and it refuses me entry I've emailed tech support and the help desk about four days and until now No answer. I really did not expect this kind of service from Yahoo at all, I've been with you guys for years, but this is the worst it as been, I need to get in my account right now I'm locked out going four days now, I can't access it from my computer. Please can anyone help, I need to use my account every day. ~Thanks”

On Sunday, Trenette stated that she’s had problems for over a week and would like to close the account: “Please close my account please it’s been compromised, its been over a week. or do I have to call corporate office”

Sandra questioned the level of customer service on Friday:  “Yahoo - why am I locked out? how about some answers.......do you not care about your customers????”

Rod logged his complaint on February 8 and, apparently, someone reset his security password for him, “I am having the same problem I have been locked out of my account. The security question is not the security question I would have chosen. It's asking where I spent my honeymoon and I have never been married. I need to retrieve my contacts. Someone hacked my account and sent to all my contacts an email, and a lot of them were rejected and shortly after that is when I couldn't get back into my emails. I called a couple numbers but got someone in India and they were trying to get personal information out of me and said all my computers were compromised and wanted me to pay them money to try to fix it. You are asking for my email address below, but how are you going to contact me if I cannot access my email???????"

Good question, Rod! How will they contact you, at the compromised email address, if you can’t access your email?

Other complaints include calling a customer service number and being advised that the user would have to pay $150.00 to fix the account; an entire office is down; and the account has been infected with spyware. Seriously, Yahoo? There must be a lot of infected machines to cause such a “high volume” of inquiries. 

So, what does one do when your account has been hacked and the provider has done nothing to notify you or provide any mechanism to lodge a complaint, much less give you assurance that they are working on the problem? 

Well, you can always write an article for PolicyMic.