Are Yahoo! mail hacking rumours true?

I have had a Yahoo! mail account since 1999 - it was one of my very first email accounts & I still use it today even though it now gets bombarded by SPAM emails.  I heard a while back that there was a way of being able to hack into a Yahoo! account, by basically ‘tricking’ the system into giving you your login details by using the ‘forgotten password’ options. I don’t know the full details of the rumour, and if I did I wouldn’t re-post it on this site (so don’t ask!).  Anyway, I later dismissed this as nothing more than just another rumour / scare mongering that we see and hear on a daily basis.

However, I recently tried to login into my Yahoo! account, and it would not let me progress until I provided a secondary email account which they can use in the instance that I have forgotten my password. I managed to click in and out of the site, and could access my email without having to provide this information. I don’t know why, but I simply did not want to give them any more information about me, and I’m not going to forget my password - I’ve been using it for 10 years!  Anyway, I’ve been avoiding entering this information and I’m now completely locked out of my account unless I enter in this secondary email.

This suggests to me that perhaps there may be more to the rumours than I originally thought. Sending the information to a secondary email address would resolve the issue. However, I don’t want to give them that information. Perhaps I’m just being difficult, but what if this was my only email account? Would I have to create a new account just so that I could continue using it?  The other thing I found annoying, is that there is no way to refuse to enter it or to contact Yahoo! about it. Has anyone else experienced similar issues, or can you shed some light on the issue?