Three unnamed sources told Reuters that Yahoo developed a custom tool that allowed the NSA and FBI to scan emails post officey in real time for specified words and expressions. The services could then retrieve the emails when they found something interesting.
According to the publication, Yahoo was the recipient of classified requests from the two services that needed to develop this special software at the beginning of 2015, which the company eventually developed in May of 2015.
The three sources report that while the company initially planned to move against government demands that required the development of spyware, Yahoo's legal service did not think it would win the case, so Yahoo's CEO Marissa Mayer gave the Technical Department the green light for the construction of the real-time spy tool.
Mayer seems to have hidden all of the above from Yahoo's CISO, Alex Stamos. Reuters reports that the team ασφαλείας της Yahoo ανακάλυψε το εργαλείο ένα μήνα αργότερα, και αρχικά νόμιζαν ότι ήταν hacked.
Έτσι επειδή η Mayer πήρε την απόφαση για την ανάπτυξη αυτού του εργαλείου χωρίς να το γνωρίζει ο Alex Stamos, CISO της Yahoo, παραιτήθηκε ένα μήνα αργότερα και προσλήφθηκε από το Facebook.
According to another New York Times publication last week, Mayer was unaware of security issues Alex Stamos discovered to raise his security budget. The result of course we all know since Yahoo was hacked into 2014, and the intruders managed to intercept data over 500 million users of Yahoo.
Reuters reports that it was unable to verify what kind and how much data from the emails the NSA and FBI might have with the system developed by Yahoo.
According to the three insiders, the tool allowed agencies agencies to create activation words and phrases that functioned as a filter for all of Yahoo's e-mail traffic by scanning emails and attachments in real time.
