Yahoo joins the list of companies refusing to share details with government agencies.
With the ever growing resentment against the scrutiny by government's, Yahoo has become the latest technology company to promise to alert its users if it thinks their accounts have been attacked by “state-sponsored actors” – hackers working on behalf of governments.
“Yahoo will now notify you if we strongly suspect that your account may have been targeted by a state-sponsored actor,” said Bob Lord, Yahoo’s chief information security officer, in a blog post announcing the change.
These specific notifications will be sent to the users so that they can take appropriate measures to protect their accounts and devices in light of these sophisticated attacks.
The actions to be taken by the users include turning on two-step verification; changing their password to a stronger one that has never been used before; updating their account recovery information; and checking recent activity on their account.
Yahoo’s move comes two months after Facebook made a similar announcement in October, telling its users that it would notify them if their account is being targeted or compromised by an attacker suspected of working on behalf of a nation-state.
In December, Twitter had issued a similar warning to a number of its users.
Google, meanwhile, made this move in June 2012 for a subset of its users who it believed might be targets for phishing, malware or other attacks from state-sponsored “bad actors”.
By necessity, all of these companies decline to provide detailed information on the potential attackers they have identified.