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    • First Half of the Semester
      • Week 1: Overview of Course
      • Week 2: TCP/IP and Network Architecture
      • Week 3: Reconnaissance
      • Week 4: Vulnerability scanning
      • Week 5: System and User enumeration
      • Week 6: Sniffers
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      • Week 8: Social Engineering, Encoding, and Encryption
      • Week 9: Malware
      • Week 10: Web application hacking, Intercepting Proxies, and URL Editing
      • Week 11: SQL injection
      • Week 12: Web Services
      • Week 13: Evasion Techniques
      • Week 14: Review of all topics and wrap up discussion
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ITACS 5211: Introduction to Ethical Hacking

Wade Mackay

Yahoo Built a Secret Tool to Scan Your eMail Content for US Spy Agency

October 7, 2016 by Scott Radaszkiewicz 2 Comments

Article Link:  Click for Article

This article is about Yahoo building a software program that would secretly scan users emails, and this was done at the request of a US intelligence officials.  This was done in 2015 via a secret court order and the information is reported to have gone to the NSA or FBI.

Many top Yahoo officials were unaware of this and the Chief Information Security Officer resigned from the company, expressing regret that he was left out of this information.

It’s pretty scary how open our lives have become.   I assume, if there was a court order, there was a legitimate concern.  But it just goes to reinforce the fact that you should not put anything into any digital medium that you would not want being read by another person!  There is no privacy.   Be it hackers or the government, the information can be obtained!

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Reader Interactions

Comments

  1. Loi Van Tran says

    October 10, 2016 at 11:41 am

    Thanks for the post Scott,

    Your last statement make it very clear, don’t digitized anything that you don’t want nobody to see. For consumers using digital applications, they have to make the choice between their privacy and their convenience. It is a decision that should not be taken lightly, but more often than not, people download and install applications without a second thought to their privacy. Just remember that in the digital age, nothing is ever truly deleted.

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  2. Mengxue Ni says

    October 13, 2016 at 2:30 pm

    Thanks for sharing this new, Scott! Yahoo is suffering from the data breach crisis now. If this is confirmed to be true, I think they won’t be able to get through it, they may become bankruptcy. I know there are couple companies interested in making an acquisition of Yahoo.

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Weekly Discussions

  • Uncategorized (133)
  • Week 01: Overview (1)
  • Week 02: TCP/IP and Network Architecture (8)
  • Week 03: Reconnaisance (25)
  • Week 04: Vulnerability Scanning (19)
  • Week 05: System and User Enumeration (15)
  • Week 06: Sniffers (9)
  • Week 07: NetCat and HellCat (11)
  • Week 08: Social Engineering, Encoding and Encryption (12)
  • Week 09: Malware (14)
  • Week 10: Web Application Hacking (12)
  • Week 11: SQL Injection (11)
  • Week 12: Web Services (10)
  • Week 13: Evasion Techniques (7)
  • Week 14: Review of all topics (5)

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