Yahoo will now let you know when governments are trying to hack into your Yahoo Mail account, just like Gmail

Dec 22, 2015 22:19 GMT  ·  By

Yahoo! is the latest Silicon Valley giant to add support for an alerts system that sends out notifications to users when the company suspects a state-sponsored attack on their account.

The first to implement such a system was Google, for Gmail, in 2012, and in recent months, both Facebook and Twitter have decided to provide this feature as well.

With the activity of APT groups growing more and more in the past few years, and with no week passing by without a cyber-security vendor reporting on one or more nefarious cyber-espionage campaigns, the threat of state-sponsored attacks is becoming something more common, which affects more and more persons.

While most users won't ever be targeted or see a state-sponsored notification from any of the services mentioned above, journalists, political dissidents, military personnel, or people working in government agencies may be interested in this type of alerts.

Users should take active steps to secure their accounts after receiving an alert

According to a blog post on the Yahoo's Tumblr, the security team has announced the addition of this feature but has also presented a list of actions each user will have at their disposal to make sure their account was not compromised.

First and foremost, users are to immediately enable Account Key or Two-Factor Authentication for their accounts, while also changing their password right after.

The company also recommends strong and unique passwords for the targeted account but also asks users to perform a security audit as soon as possible. This means checking the account recovery section for new or unknown data (recovery email addresses, phone numbers), checking if mail forwarding was secretly turned on to an unknown address, checking reply-to settings for the same thing, and also reviewing recent activity in Yahoo's account history.

Yahoo tells users they should not panic when receiving a state-sponsored attack warning. Receiving such a notice only means the account was targeted, and not necessarily compromised.