Zombies Aren’t Real?

Years ago, when the Internet was just starting to catch on with a mass market, one of the strongest forces on the scene was Yahoo, which served many of the same functions (and niches) that are covered today by Google, Facebook, Blogger (or any other web host for blogs), Craig’s List and even eBay. Along with AOL and CompuServe (remember them?) Yahoo was one of the giants of the new digital age we all thought was coming – and I expect that someday children or grandchildren of today’s kids will be asking me (and the other tribal elders) to tell them of this time. But sadly, not much is left of Yahoo today – the company has wasted away to where it is almost the desiccated remains of its original self, lurching around like a b-movie zombie. However, that’s still no excuse for subjecting innocent people to zombie SPAM attacks from a former customer…

You can pick up the story from the CBS affiliate station in Tampa Bay if you want to, but the basic idea is that a Yahoo customer passed away in 2009, and about two months ago a hacker managed to take over her account and started beaming SPAM to everyone in her address book. It’s unclear from the story if the miscreants in question are actually earning or scamming any money by doing this, or if they just enjoy inflicting emotional distress on the family (and it’s possible that no one really knows). What we do know is that Yahoo has resisted all efforts to date to disconnect, disable or cancel the account, and is insisting that the family provide them with a copy of the death certificate (which is proving difficult to come by). Meanwhile, the hackers involved keep changing the passwords, moving to different referral accounts, and generally making it impossible for the family (or any other user) to shut down the account from the user interface side…

Now, I don’t mean to suggest that Yahoo – or any other email provider – shouldn’t take great care with their online security, and especially with verification of identity before deactivating an account or deleting online files. What makes this case so egregious is that their security has already been buggered six ways from Sunday; if the user account contained any sensitive information in the first place it would have been sold to anyone who wanted it by now, and if there was anything that could possibly be used to steal their late customer’s identity you can be certain it has been. We can’t be sure from the events cited here if the company is doing anything about the original data intrusion or not, but it certainly appears that they’re limiting their response to making things difficult for the family…

It probably doesn’t help that you can verify that the original user has passed away by any number of other methods, including several public websites. That is, such sources don’t really do anything to help the company verify the information (all of these sources can be defrauded in different ways), but the combination goes a long way toward making Yahoo look like a bunch of incompetent buffoons who are more concerned with covering their own behinds than they are with doing the decent thing. I can’t tell you how close the company really is to shuffling off this mortal coil; many companies continued lurching along for decades after everyone has given them up for dead, in a sort of half-living state that approximates a monster-movie zombie was well as any purely legal entity is ever likely to. I can only tell you that screw-ups like this make it seem as though Yahoo doesn’t have a brain OR a heart…

So go on; tell me that zombies aren’t real…