"There is no encryption, not even scrambling of the packets content," Hakin9 concluded.įour years later, CNET contacted Yahoo as part of a privacy survey we conducted of companies providing instant messaging services. A 2004 article ( PDF) in Hakin9 magazine described how to intercept Yahoo messages using the tcpdump utility. Yahoo users' vulnerability to snoops has been public knowledge for at least a decade. Wade Overturned, Your Abortion Searches Could Be Used to Prosecute You Worries About Post-Roe Data Privacy Put Spotlight on Period Apps.Pegasus Spyware and Citizen Surveillance: Here's What You Should Know.Phone Searches at Border Crossings Violate Privacy Rights, Senator Says.VPN Demand Surges in Iran as Protests Continue, Study Shows."Whether it's the lack of encryption in Webmail, or the video issue, Yahoo has ignored repeated warnings from researchers, from human rights activists." "We have ample evidence now that Yahoo doesn't really care about security or the confidentiality of its customers' communications," said Chris Soghoian, principal technologist at the ACLU's Speech, Privacy and Technology Project. SSL and similar technologies, if implemented properly, are designed to be proof against even the NSA's aggressive attempts to vacuum up petabytes of Internet traffic.
That was possible because Yahoo has lagged far behind rivals Google and Microsoft in adopting a standard technique known as SSL that scrambles information before it's transmitted. A surveillance system code-named Optic Nerve "intercepted and stored the webcam images of millions of Internet users not suspected of wrongdoing," the paper said, citing documents provided by Snowden.
These privacy problems were highlighted by a Guardian article Thursday, which revealed that spy agencies were eavesdropping on Yahoo's unencrypted video chats. AOL's AIM service encrypts content - but leaks metadata about who's talking to whom. Nine months after Edward Snowden revealed extreme Internet surveillance by US and British intelligence agencies, some major technology companies have yet to take rudimentary steps to shield their users' instant messages from eavesdropping.Ī CNET analysis shows that Yahoo and ICQ transmit the content of supposedly private instant messages in unencrypted form, exposing them to both government spies and malicious snoops on the same Wi-Fi network.
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