Bach Seat

Do you remember Yahoo Messenger? It was popular in the late ’90s and early 2000s when there were only two messengers to communicate with your friends and family. Well … the remnants of Yahoo nee Verizon recently announced the end of Yahoo Messenger. Verizon (VZ)/Yahoo announced that they will disable the Yahoo Messenger service after July 17th, 2018. (rb- yes Yahoo Messenger was still a thing – in the face of Apple‘s (AAPL) FaceTime, Telegram, Snapchat, and Facebook‘s (FB) WhatsApp).

According to the Oath website, YIM had 122.6 million users at its peak. In the FAQ announcing the shutdown, Yahoo said, “We know we have many loyal fans who have used Yahoo Messenger since its beginning  … As the communications landscape continues to change over, we’re focusing on building and introducing new, exciting communications tools that better fit consumer needs.” If you’re looking for a Messenger replacement from Yahoo, they recommend Squirrel, which is in closed beta and by invite only. But why?

YIM leaves a dubious security legacy, as all “free” web products do. In 2007 there were reports that up to 75%  of the users in Yahoo Messenger were SPAMBots. In 2010 all Yahoo systems and customer email accounts were hacked by the Chinese military in “Operation Aurora.” In Operation Aurora the Chinese also attacked Adobe (ADBE), Dow Chemical, Google (GOOG) Juniper Networks (JNPR), Morgan Stanley, Northrop Grumman (NOC), Rackspace (RAX), and Symantec (SYMC).

In 2014 The Guardian reported that The British intelligence agency Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ)’s secret mass surveillance program Optic Nerve and National Security Agency (NSA) were indiscriminately collecting still images from Yahoo webcam streams from millions of mostly innocent Yahoo webcam users, among other things creating a database for facial recognition for future use. Optic Nerve takes a still image from the webcam stream every 5 minutes. Also in 2014 Yahoo was also hit by a hack that affected around 500 million people.

In September 2016, The New York Times reported that Yahoo’s security team, had pressed for Yahoo to adopt end-to-end encryption sometime between 2014 and 2015, but senior leadership resisted, “…because it would have hurt Yahoo’s ability to index and search message data.”

In 2017 Yahoo announced that all of its customer’s accounts were compromised. Allegedly Yahoo did not detect the full extent of the 2013 hack until  4 years later. In 2017, Yahoo announced that all 3 billion accounts were compromised.

You can download your chat history for the next 6 months at this download request site. Yahoo will email your chats to you. If you have anything you want to save from Yahoo Messenger, it’s a good idea to get a copy, because users will be unable to sign in to the service after July 17th.

rb-

YIM is not the first long-standing chat app to shut down – AOL Instant Messenger shut down December 15, 2017. But Yahoo Messenger was one of the few old-school messaging services left.

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Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.