British Telecom (BT), one of the largest telecommunications providers in the world, said that the company is dropping Yahoo as their default email service. By next month, the company will convert six million email accounts to the new BT Mail, run by California-based company Critical Path.
The change is largely thanks to hackers attacking BTYahoo account holders and locking them out of Yahoo's system. Troublesome, if you're dependent on Yahoo's services.
The attacks started in February, when BT customers began complaining that they were locked out of their BT Yahoo accounts. Those compromised accounts, according to The Telegraph, then began sending out malicious spam to emails addresses found in a compromised account's contact list. After an investigation in March, BT and Yahoo determined that the compromised email accounts were being accessed by computers in Russia and Turkey.
The account hijackings, security experts tell The Telegraph, appear to involve a vulnerability Yahoo allegedly patched in January. Yahoo also doesn't have the same security features as other email systems, neglecting to offer two-step verification - a security feature which can significantly deter account hijackings.
"Yahoo is the only one that doesn't have the ability to warn you that somebody else has accessed your account," Chester Wisniewski, a senior adviser at the security firm Sophos said to The Huffington Post. "If I were advising a friend who needed a free email account, I'd say stay away from Yahoo."
That may help explain why BT decided to end its 10 year relationship with Yahoo and start its own.
"The new BT.com will feature breaking and exclusive news and features from a dedicated team of journalists at the Press Association covering areas such as news, entertainment and lifestyle," Nick Wong, director of online for BT's consumer division stated in a press release. "We will be switching customers' email over to BT Mail, which will include the features and functions they expect from a modern email service. It will also feature in-built anti-virus and anti-spam solutions."
Aside from new emails, BT customers will also have access to a new portal website, BT.com, which will incorporate breaking news, entertainment and lifestyle.
Since most of Yahoo!'s traffic - and advertisement revenue - comes from its email service and its homepage, this is likely to hit the company relatively hard. Even though the BTYahoo users are a fraction of the 280 million users around the world, the loss is a troubling sign for the company, and could be a massive set back for Marissa Mayer, Yahoo's CEO of just under a year.
In December, Yahoo! Mail was redesigned to a more modern look, but it has continued to be troubled by hackers and privacy protection issues.
Since the initial discovery, BTYahoo has advised its users to change their passwords and security questions as Yahoo continued to probe the issue.
