Yahoo says working to bring back auto forwarding feature

Yahoo said it is working to bring back its automatic email forwarding feature after a planned, temporary disablement. Users will soon receive an update to the functionality of automatic email forwards, a company spokesperson said.

The report about the disablement of the feature was first reported by the Associated Press on Monday.



The AP also said that while those who have set up forwarding in the past are unaffected, users who would want to leave following recent hacking and surveillance revelations are struggling to shift to rival services. Earlier, Yahoo announced that at least 500 million of its accounts were hacked in 2014 by what it believed was a state-sponsored actor, a theft that appeared to be the world’s biggest known cyber breach by far. Cyber thieves may have stolen names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords, the company said. But unprotected passwords, payment card data and bank account information did not appear to have been compromised, signaling that some of the most valuable user data was not taken.

The attack on Yahoo was unprecedented in size, more than triple other large attacks on sites such as eBay, and it comes to light at a difficult time for Yahoo.



Although the attack happened in 2014, Yahoo only discovered the incursion after August reports of a separate breach. While that report turned out to be false, Yahoo’s investigation turned up the 2014 theft