When Yahoo was hacked in 2013, it reportedly exposed one billion user accounts to malicious actors. That discovery itself was only made in 2016, after it was uncovered by an investigation into a cyber attack earlier that year. Now, it just looks like Yahoo somehow has even worse news to deliver.?
Reuters
As it turns out, it isn¡¯t just 1 billion people who are vulnerable thanks to the breach. Instead, the company just announced that all of its 3 billion accounts were leaked. That affects everyone from those who had Yahoo emails, to others that signed up for associated services like Flickr.
In their 2016 statement, Yahoo said the hack not only siphoned off user account information like the email address and passwords, hackers were also able to obtain names, birthdays, phone numbers and, in some cases, ¡°encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.¡±? The one thing Yahoo insist on however, is that the passwords were not in plain text, and the hackers didn¡¯t get their hands on any linked credit card information.
Yahoo is now a part of a new division called Oath, after being acquired by Verizon for $4.48 billion four months ago. That price was at least $350 million less than the original offer thanks to a sequence of crippling hacks. Yahoo says it discovered the new evidence while integrating with AOL into Oath.