Latest Yahoo Hack Affects One Billion Users

Yahoo is reporting yet another hack said TechCrunch on Wednesday. It says  hackers stole data from more than one billion user accounts in August 2013, in what is thought to be the largest data breach at an email provider.

The Sunnyvale, California, company was also home to what’s now most likely the second largest hack in history, one that exposed 500 million Yahoo accounts . The company disclosed that breach in September. Yahoo said it hasn’t identified the intrusion associated with this theft.

My biggest fear with the latest Yahoo hack is someone finding out that I have a Yahoo account.

— RickDiB (@RickDiB) December 14, 2016

Yahoo says the information stolen may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays and security questions and answers. The company says it believes bank-account information and payment-card data were not affected.

Yahoo hack: security of one billion accounts breached https://t.co/w12GeCPDk2

— Guardian news (@guardiannews) December 14, 2016

But the company said hackers may have also stolen passwords from the affected accounts. Technically, those passwords should be secure; Yahoo said they were scrambled twice — once by encryption and once by another technique called hashing. But hackers have become adept at cracking secured passwords by assembling huge dictionaries of similarly scrambled phrases and matching them against stolen password databases.

I think the most disturbing thing about the Yahoo hack is that it happened over 3 years ago, and we're just learning about it now.

— Alissa Grosso (@alissagrosso) December 15, 2016

One of the biggest threats for Yahoo users is for those that use the Yahoo password on other sites. This is not the first time a large breach of security has happened at Yahoo. Secure email providers like Thexyz were quick to extend a free migration from Yahoo promotion that originally ended in October 2016 after Yahoo disclosed the previous breach.

We have extended the free migration promotion until Dec 31st. Coupon code: yahoo – https://t.co/Ayhu6JvKHQ

— thexyz (@thexyz) December 15, 2016