Tech Talk at ShieldsGroup

I had all but stopped using Yahoo mail since, in my estimation, they didn’t take security as seriously as Gmail, but in recent months, Yahoo’s offered better protection than in the past.

If you’re concerned about security and using Yahoo for email, here’s five steps to making your Yahoo mail more secure.

1. Turn on SSL (secure socket layers) in Yahoo. This encrypts ALL mail in and out of yahoo, something they should have done years ago, but just initiated under pressure from security experts. You can see how to do this at http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2013/01/08/yahoo-mail-https-ssl/
2. Turn on Two-step verification logins on Yahoo. You can read about that here: http://news.softpedia.com/news/Yahoo-Introduces-Secure-Two-Step-Verification-Logins-239586.shtml (See the note at the end of this list.)
3. Use passwords that are sophisticated. You might use nonsense phrases that have meaning to you with misspelled words and numbers. Then you can easily remember them.
4. Keep your software updated: Java, your browser, MS Office, etc.
5. Also, be sure you have commercial grade antivirus on your PCs. You should use antivirus even if you’re using a Mac. The Java exploit that’s been trashing machines over the past few weeks didn’t care what machine you were running.

Two-step verification may seem laborious, but it’s worth the trouble as it makes it very hard for others to access your email. However, on a machine that has a key-logger (a form of malware), if you use the “Answer your secret question” option, you’re still giving away access to your account. Instead, I always have Yahoo text my phone and enter the code they text.

I still feel Gmail is more secure in that it has actually caught compromises and prevented me from sending messages that I didn’t compose — locking the account until I could resecure it.

However, if you prefer Yahoo, these five steps should help secure your email.

Recently, I’ve noted that while searching for things that I KNOW are online, Google fails to return any results. How do I know they are online?  Because they are on my personal blog at blog.shieldsgroup.com.

Since I am curious, I searched for them on Yahoo!  Instead of showing me one page of about ten results, Yahoo! showed me two pages of about 20.  While Google failed to list results from this blog, Yahoo! listed them all, plus others.

I am not sure why Google failed.  It lists results from more current posts on this blog.  Maybe Google assumed that if someone blogged something in the past searchers don’t need to find it (?)

In any case, I’ve made Yahoo! my default search — again.

Yahoo!

Recently I downloaded Yahoo! Autosync version 1.0.4.9 so I could put my Outlook calendar on Yahoo! and share it with the secretary at the office. It worked great at first — but then stopped performing as advertised — saying it was timing out when trying to communicate with the server.

Then when I would load my calendar at “http://calendar.yahoo.com” it would give me an error. Error 999.

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