Yahoo! hacked...half a billion accounts compromised!
So, the big news is, Yahoo was hacked and roughly a half-a-Billion accounts surrendered their information... in 2014 (for those keeping score, that was 2 years ago). As Reuters puts it:
Quote:
Yahoo Inc (YHOO.O) said on Thursday that at least 500 million of its accounts were hacked in 2014 by what it believed was a state-sponsored actor, a theft that appeared to be the world's biggest known cyber breach by far.
Cyber thieves may have stolen names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords, the company said. But unprotected passwords, payment card data and bank account information did not appear to have been compromised, signaling that some of the most valuable user data was not taken.
The attack on Yahoo was unprecedented in size, more than triple other large attacks on sites such as eBay Inc (EBAY.O), and it comes to light at a difficult time for Yahoo.
Put away that checkbook, there's MORE ... More? ... yes, more
According to The Daily Skimm, a news aggregating source:
Quote:
Last month, a hacker called "Peace" claimed to be selling data from 200 million Yahoo users. Yahoo said it was investigating the claim, and then yesterday, the company said 'yup, it's true and it's worse than we thought.' According to The 'Hoo, more than half a billion user accounts were hacked in 2014. The good news? Yahoo doesn't think sensitive financial data was affected. The bad news? Things like names, email addresses, and telephone numbers were affected. Yahoo says it think this was a "state-sponsored actor," but they're not naming any countries yet. Which opens the door to lots of fun guessing.
DIDN'T SOMEONE JUST BUY YAHOO?
Yes. Earlier this year, Verizon said 'mine' to Yahoo's core internet properties (think: email, news, sports). But the almost $5 billion sale isn't final yet, and Verizon says it just learned about the breach this week. So how this affects the deal is TBD. Also TBD? Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer's job. She was brought on in 2012 to turn things around. Spoiler: things turned. Just not around.
