Email Bombardment
The first and least severe penalty to giving out your email address is the email bombardment you will likely receive. If some store wants your email, it’s likely because they want to send you something — this is obvious. However, some stores abuse this power more than others. As a result, one store can send you several emails a day, flooding your inbox and making your account less efficient.

Read More: How Do the Presidential Candidates View Cybersecurity?

Sensitive Information
Some people utilize sensitive information to comprise their email addresses, for some reason. For instance, many will use their birthday as a number to make their email unique. If a malicious person were to gain access to information such as your birthday or your address, this could be a gateway to hacking your social media and banking accounts. If your email has sensitive information, think twice before exposing it to strangers.

Phishing
One could logically say that Target and Wal-Mart probably won’t use your email to phish you. However, there are smaller and less well renowned retail stores that could utilize your email for malicious purposes. These stores could send you a phishing email, prompting you to enter your vital information into a malicious website. This could obviously lead to a breach of security for several of your accounts if your information falls into the wrong hands.

It Serves As an ID For Multiple Websites
Think about how many websites you use your email address for as your login. For this reason, your email address should be treated as a relatively private account. Giving it out to random retail stores could lead to certain employees trying to hack your online accounts. However, if you use several different emails for different websites, then this should not raise a concern for you.

In sum, while you shouldn’t completely avoid giving your email out to retail stores, you should heavily consider the source prior to exposing this sensitive information. While it seems safe to give out your email, this could potentially lead to catastrophic account breaches.

Not only do these emails contain political content, but they also contain personal information that could devastate a campaign. Moreover, top secret political information can be communicated via email, so national security could be in grave danger if a confidential email is hacked and falls into the wrong hands. Hacked information with leaked gossip could tarnish the reputation of any elected official.

Read More: What Are the Mail.ru Attacks? Am I at Risk?

For example, the Democratic National Committee had an email leak that alluded to a somewhat fixed election by the hands of the DNC delegates. Secretary of State Colin Powell also had a variety of emails hacked that revealed his personal dislike for the current presidential candidates and other federal officials.

This series of hacks has caused other businesses to launch a more discrete communication policy. For example, Goldman Sachs uses the acronym “LDL,” meaning “let’s discuss live,” whenever they want to send a confidential message. Other executives are utilizing pseudonyms to assert personal security.

However, many are looking positively upon these hackings, as they are providing a check on the potential corruption of politicians. While the system of checks and balances seems to be maintaining the stability of the federal government, there is always a possibility of dishonesty. Thus, the hacking of these emails could potentially expose politicians who are unfairly attempting to promote a deceitful agenda.

Why were these emails hacked?
These hacking victims obviously didn’t have PSafe Total installed! PSafe Total offers features to help maximize the safety of your private information. Advanced Protection is a function within PSafe Total that allows PSafe to protect your device from third-party uninstalls in case of loss or theft. This maximizes the privacy of your photos, messages, and personal data. Additionally, PSafe Total’s anti-theft feature tracks, blocks, locates, and even erases all of your data remotely in case of loss or theft.

“The account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers,” Yahoo said in a statement.

Yahoo is urging users to change passwords immediately and are currently working with law enforcement on the breach that has affected 500 million yahoo accounts today alone.

Back in August, a large-scale data breach was rumored to be brewing when a hacker that goes by the name of “Peace” claimed they were selling Yahoo accounts by the millions (200 million to be exact).While Yahoo originally said it was “aware of a claim”, fast-forward 2 months and the hacker’s damage has proven to be far more in counting causing several users wondering how to recover their data.

What to do now:

1. Protect your Yahoo account by resetting your password and security questions
2. Run an Antivirus scan to keep your email account protected from hackers