Hack steals info from 500M Yahoo accounts
Associated Press
SAN FRANCISCO
Computer hackers swiped personal information from at least 500 million Yahoo accounts in what is believed to be the biggest digital break-in at an email provider.
The massive security breakdown disclosed Thursday poses new headaches for Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer as she scrambles to close a $4.8 billion sale to Verizon Communication.
The breach Thursday dates back to late 2014, raising questions about the checks and balances within Yahoo – a fallen internet star that has been laying off staff to counter a steep drop in revenue during the past eight years.
At the time of the break-in, Yahoo’s security team was led by Alex Stamos, a respected industry executive who left last year to take a similar job at Facebook.
Yahoo didn’t explain what took so long to uncover a breach that it blamed on a “state-sponsored actor” – parlance for a hacker working on behalf of a foreign government. The Sunnyvale, Calif., company declined to explain how it reached its conclusions about the attack, but said it is working with the FBI and other law enforcement as part of its ongoing investigation.
“This is a pretty big deal that is probably going to cost them tens of millions of dollars,” predicted Avivah Litan, a computer security analyst for Gartner Inc. “Regulators and lawyers are going to have a field day with this one.”
Litan described it as the most accounts stolen from a single email provider.
The stolen data includes users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, scrambled passwords and the security questions – and answers – used to verify an account holder’s identity.