Impossible to protect your account from being compromised.

Recently, I got an email that someone had changed my Yahoo! password. After asking around, apparently the perpetrator got in to the account from the security questions. The very special part here is that they only needed my Date of Birth and Zip Code of residence. I want to point out very clearly this information is usually accessible on every single social networking site out there. So, I got the account back, and I typed gibberish into the zip code and security question's response. I'm going to hope that holds. Meanwhile, I contacted Yahoo! customer support, from their help form.

I got a canned response.

I replied to the canned response asking if there was anything that could be done to remove the security questions from my account.

I got another copy / paste response, this time from "Sherry" in Yahoo! Customer Care - Accounts and Security. In this canned response, security question issues were said to be directed to my-login-request@yahoo-inc.com. So, I followed the steps for emailing them, entering all the required information.

I got back an auto-response saying:

"Thank you for contacting Yahoo! Customer Care. Unfortunately an agent cannot respond to your question until it is submitted through a form on our Help pages. This step is required and assures that you provide the information necessary for us to answer your question."

I am so glad I don't use Yahoo! Wallet or their OpenID system. This company should never be trusted with financial data or as an authority on your online identity. In the meantime, garbling your Zip Code and Security Question Response seem to be about the only thing you can do to protect yourself.

So what am I looking for in this post (tl;dr)?

1) What exactly can be done to protect your account from being compromised since the questions Yahoo! asks are easily guessable or worse findable on sites like Facebook

2) Who exactly should someone be contacting? The help form did nothing, the email they said I should send to bounced.

3) Is there any way to remove those security question steps? I acknowledge the risk of never being able to get into my account again. But if I have to choose between me risking non-access, or risking someone having access to all my Yahoo! services, I'd much rather choose the former.