Yahoo recently released a statement that there had been data breach that happened in 2014 that was orchestrated by “state sponsored” actors. While they haven’t released anymore specifics about who did it and what was the motivation behind it, we do have a lot of information about the breach available now. Let’s break down the details of the breach for you here
What Happened?
A recent investigation by Yahoo has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from their systems in late 2014 by what the company believes is a state-sponsored actor. They are closely coordinating with law enforcement on this matter and working diligently to protect you and ensure that your privacy is intact and sensitive data is safe.
What Information Was Involved?
The stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Not all of these data elements may have been present for your account. The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation found to be affected.
What Are The Yahoo Folks Doing
They are taking action to protect the users:
- They are asking potentially affected users to promptly change their passwords and adopt alternate means of account verification.
- They invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so they cannot be used to access an account.
- They are recommending that all users who haven’t changed their passwords since 2014 do so.
- They continue to enhance the systems that detect and prevent unauthorized access to user accounts.
- They are working closely with law enforcement on this matter.
The Yahoo investigation into this matter continues.
What You Can Do
We encourage you to follow these security recommendations:
- Change your password and security questions for any other accounts on which you used the same or similar information used for your Yahoo account.
- Review your accounts for suspicious activity.
- Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your personal information or refer you to a web page asking for personal information.
- Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.
Additionally, please consider using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password altogether.
For More Information
For more information about this issue and other security resources, please visit the Yahoo Security Issue FAQs page available at https://yahoo.com/security-update. If you have any further queries about this, please let us know and we will try and contact yahoo to get them sorted out for you
But given the sheer number of years and the staggering numbers of users that yahoo is used to handling, we would not worry much about the data breach. They have a long record of being tested on this front and have always managed to come up trumps every time. Also remember that they now have Verizon and all their resources at their disposal.
