Yahoo! to Ramp Up Email Security With New Encryption Feature

Yahoo! is following Google’s lead in its plans to create a more secure email service, mirroring a shift in demand for increased privacy online. Alex Stamos, hired as Yahoo! chief information security officer in February, addressed network security conference Black Hat 2014 Thursday evening and announced the company was exploring end-to-end encryption of its email system. The feature would make use of PGP encryption which scrambles data so it is unreadable to hackers. The encryption feature, which users would opt to turn on or off, is expected to be rolled out in 2015 to the service's estimated 110 million unique users.