1 billion customers accounts being hacked record in Yahoo recently. .The company said Wednesday that it was hit by yet another hacking attack, this time affecting more than 1 billion user accounts. That's double the number affected by a hack revealed in September.
The hack occurred in August 2013. Stolen data included users' names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords. Those passwords are scrambled up with an encryption tool called MD5, which experts say is possible to crack with some patience. The data also included some security questions and answers, some of which weren't encrypted.
Yahoo president and CEO Marissa Mayer speaks at an event 2015 in San Francisco.
"Yahoo is notifying potentially affected users and has taken steps to secure their accounts, including requiring users to change their passwords," the company said in a statement. "Yahoo has also invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account."
Among the victims are more than 150,000 US government and military employees, presenting a threat to national security, according to a Bloomberg report. The accounts belong to current and former White House staff, congressmen and their aides, FBI agents, officials at the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and each branch of the US military.
The breach is another black eye for Chief Executive Marissa Mayer, who joined Yahoo in 2012 amid great fanfare. The former Google executive was charged with turning Yahoo around and tried to bring the lumbering company into the smartphone era. She made big bets on mobile, refreshing all of the company's mobile apps, but Yahoo hasn't been able to make much money off her projects.
The announcement caps off a rough few months for the troubled tech giant and leaves another blemish on a company seeking to sell itself to Verizon. When Yahoo announced a separate data breach in September, in which hackers in 2014 swiped user information from half a billion accounts, it was said to be the biggest cybersecurity breach ever.
Two weeks later, the company again came under fire after a report said Yahoo built tools to surveil customers' emails for US intelligence officials.
All the while, Yahoo has been awaiting its fate with Verizon, which agreed to buy the company for $4.8 billion in July. The deal is set to close in the first quarter of next year, but Yahoo's disclosure of the previous hack had given Verizon executives pause about the deal.
"We are confident in Yahoo's value and we continue to work toward integration with Verizon," a Yahoo spokeswoman said Wednesday.
Source # website
No comments:
Post a Comment