Yahoo mangled e-mail text to foil "hackers"

Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit

In the "You Get What You Pay For" Department...

Yahoo claims that it tried to "foil hackers" by altering words in
people's TEXT e-mail, a completely idiotic and absurd notion.
People's ordinary text got mangled, and goodness knows what happened
to the e-mail of programmers, who actually do exchange snippets of
real code all the time, in plain text, simply as part of their work.
Real programmers probably don't use the free and highly restricted
Yahoo anyway. - NY Transfer

Reuters via Yahoo - July 17, 2002


Yahoo Admits Changing E-Mail Text to "Block Hackers"

By Andrea Orr 

PALO ALTO, Calif. (Reuters) - If you ever used Yahoo! mail to ask a
potential employer to "evaluate" your resume, they might have
concluded your grasp of the English language was insufficient for the
job.

Yahoo! Inc. confirmed on Wednesday that its e-mail software has
automatically changed certain words -- including evaluate -- in a bid
to prevent hackers from spreading viruses.

Although the company declined to list the words its software had been
changing, a report on the technology news Web site, News.com,
reported that the program changes "mocha" to "espresso," and the
phrase "eval" to "review."

"Evaluate," then, becomes, "reviewuate," and that job application
doesn't look so polished anymore.

A spokeswoman for Yahoo said the word-changing program was just one
of several practices the company takes to ensure the security of its
e-mail.

The problem with words like mocha, she said, is that along with
describing a flavor and a color, it is a special command in the
JavaScript computer language, which hackers may intercept to launch
malicious programs.

Aside from a general list of e-mail guidelines, which states that
Yahoo will take measures to insure tight security, the company had
not previously disclosed the word-changing practice to e-mail users.

While some security experts, including Alex Shipp of the e-mail
filtering company MessageLabs, said Yahoo's practice was a reasonable
tactic to keep its e-mail secure, others noted that they knew of no
other e-mail services that were changing the text in messages.

"It looks to me like it's just buggy software," said Richard Smith,
who runs the Web security site ComputerBytesMan.com. Smith said
companies typically intercept hackers by blocking certain underlying
computer code, but not the actual text of the messages.

A spokeswoman for Microsoft Corp. said its free e-mail service,
HotMail, blocks certain pieces of software code that may be used by
hackers, without interfering with any of the actual words contained
in the e-mail messages.

Searches of such non-English words like "reviewuate" and "medireview"
-- changed from "medieval -- produce thousands of results on the
Internet search engine Google ( news - external web site), offering
some indication of how often Yahoo's mail system has replaced words.

However, a test message Wednesday on Yahoo mail transmitted the words
"mocha" and "evaluate" with no changes. Yahoo was not immediately
available to say whether or when it had changed its practices.
 
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nytcov-07.20.02-07:50:14-31487