http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/29/technology/daily-report-latest-hack-shows-yahoos-weak-security-history.html 2016-09-28 20:21:26 Daily Report: Latest Hack Shows Yahoo’s Weak Security History The internet’s fun place had one of history’s biggest hacks, one of a series of security problems at Yahoo in recent years. === For As Nicole Perlroth and Vindu Goel At first pass, that might be surprising. Marissa Mayer, the Yahoo chief executive who recently Yahoo was also subject to the 2010 attack, but did little after that hacking to improve itself. Nor did it change when Ms. Mayer came on the scene. Why was that? Yahoo isn’t providing a detailed look, but reasons seem to include costs, difficulty and an unwillingness to compel Yahoo customers to improve their own online hygiene. Besides, security breaches had come to seem like an ordinary part of life, with costs that could be absorbed. Even when Yahoo addressed the problem, and hired a well-regarded head of security, it resisted doing things that had become common at the likes of Google, like fully encrypting messages. Taking those kinds of steps can make it a hassle to index content for searches. In a different context, tolerating the gradual decay of a quality of life is known as “ Maybe Yahoo wanted to put resources elsewhere. Or maybe it wanted to seem young and fun, without the grinding responsibilities of security. Ms. Mayer was focused on things like design, and making Yahoo seem more youthful and exuberant. That had been Yahoo’s brand in the early days of the internet, when there was less to fear about the Chinese military scooping up your funniest cat videos (maybe along with your personal address and banking information nowadays). Yahoo had had a lightweight relationship with customers, and seemed to want to win that back. But now the masses have had online life for more than 20 years, and with maturity comes vigilance, even if Yahoo didn’t want to admit it. By loving its customers the easy way, it appears to have done them an enormous disservice. And now that it will soon be part of Verizon, once-youthful Yahoo will end up working for the phone company anyway.