The plan of Yahoo Inc to inactive the user id might leads to hacking of ID’s as only 7% of IDs have the actual email accounts. Last week, the internet company announced that they are expecting to make public the inactive ID, so that the people can claim them if required. But the plan was pressed by the critics as they defend it by warning about the hackers who could control and assume the identity of users.
Yahoo expected to have a positive result for this idea, but critics fear about the security of personal information on internet which could lead to online crimes similar to revelation of massive US government snooping. But Yahoo had put forth safety measures which includes the coordination with the major web companies like Google Inc, Amazon Inc to reduce the risk of identity theft.
A senior director for consumer platform, Mr. Dylan Casey said that they are aware of possible identity theft and they have taken different steps to mitigate it with lots of thoughts and resources. But critics states that hackers could claim for inactive accounts for identity theft and if a Yahoo ID is associated with Google account, they can also access and control the latter.
A wired magazine writer, Mat Honan who has previously written about a victim of devastating hacker attack, slammed this plan of Yahoo as a “spectacularly bad idea”. Honan wrote that this will lead to social engineering gold rush come mid July, with reference to the technique of a hacker to obtain password by deceiving people rather than cracking codes.
But Casey says that the most of the inactive accounts are limited to services like Yahoo Fantasy sports which are not tied to an email address and they might not be subjected to identity theft. Casey also said that the new users of email account will not receive any unwanted mail because Yahoo will unsubscribe its inactive mail account from mailing list.
“Though we can’t assure that its absolutely impossible for anything to happen, but we are going to extraordinary length to ensure that nothing bad will happen to our users” Said Casey.
“Though the company announced its plan on June 12, users have 30 days to claim their inactive account before it is released”, said Yahoo.