Beth Worthy
2/4/2014
Last week, it was announced that Yahoo!’s security had been breached and as a result, a presumably substantial amount of personal information associated with account users had been compromised. This led and still leads to many unanswered questions for Yahoo customers and the public alike. First off, the initial announcement made by Yahoo! was described as being vague by many an inquiring mind. The opening statement to the general announcement made by Yahoo! was as follows: “Security attacks are unfortunately becoming a more regular occurrence.” Although this may seem like it was just a relatively general statement, many criticized it and went so far as to say that it seemed like the company was shrugging off not only the very action itself- which has put off many an account user- but that they were actually belittling the fact that this isn't the first time their security had been breached. In fact, back in July of 2012, a similar situation had happened leaving more than 450,000 accounts compromised. Barrages of questions have been floating around ranging from: “How is this able to keep happening?” to “Why is Yahoo! not making a bigger deal out of it than it really is?” Some have said that the initial statement was made in an attempt to ease the worried minds of those who are dreading having their personal information out there in someone’s hands. While initial reports revealed little to nothing, Yahoo! did make a statement that they believed that the attack was made by a third party database. This sprang up even more questions for people one of which being the fact that since it was a third- party database, how are they to know for sure that it was just email usernames and passwords that had been stolen? Who knows the multitude of the other information that could be involved? Since the first development of the story, the company stated that they were taking precautionary measures by advising their customers to change their passwords. But who is to say that this won’t happen again?
