Just like Google, Yahoo has expanded its encryption efforts in order to protect user data as it passes between servers and various data centers. By doing this, Yahoo hopes to restore its good reputation and come of as a company that cares about protecting its users from intrusive government agencies like the NSA.
Most of its popular services now support HTTPS, and many include it automatically. Plus, as a result of these changes, users can manually turn it on for Finance, Sports, and other services that are not necessarily receiving a large amount of private information.
Hundreds of Yahoos have been working around the clock over the last several months to provide a more secure experience for our users and we want to do even more moving forward. Our goal is to encrypt our entire platform for all users at all time, by default. – Alex Stamos, chief information security officer, Yahoo
Stamos, who was recently appointed to a prominent position with Yahoo, has been a vocal critic of the NSA’s spying and other surveillance efforts. Therefore, it is far from surprising that one of Yahoo’s primary goals is now to protect users from those types of organizations.
Even though it is able to implement HTTPS encryption for services that it directly controls, Yahoo still has to work with other companies in order to protect independent services. Once these efforts are completed, Stamos hopes that the entire Yahoo platform will be completely secure.
Hundreds of Yahoos have been working around the clock over the last several months to provide a more secure experience for our users and we want to do even more moving forward. Our goal is to encrypt our entire platform for all users at all time, by default. – Stamos
It will now be much more difficult for any organization to hack into an individual’s Yahoo account.
Question – Does Yahoo truly care about user security or is it trying to salvage its reputation?
Summary: Yahoo has implemented HTTPS encryption on most of its services. Traffic between data centers will now be protected as well. All of these changes appear to be coming in response to the NSA’s spying.
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