Hacker stole info of 500M Yahoo accounts
Prolific theft included personal data
BRIAN WOMACK AND JORDAN ROBERTSON
Yahoo! Inc. said the personal information of at least 500 million users was stolen in an attack on its accounts in 2014, exposing a wide swath of its roughly one billion users ahead of Verizon Communications Inc.’s planned acquisition of the web portal’s assets.
The attacker was a “statesponsored actor,” and stolen information may include names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, unencrypted security questions and answers, Yahoo said Thursday in a statement. The continuing investigation doesn’t indicate theft of payment card data or bank account information, or unprotected passwords, the company said. Affected users are being notified, accounts are being secured, and there’s no evidence the attacker is still in Yahoo’s network, it also said.
“Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter,” the company said in the statement.
The disclosure of the data theft comes at a particularly sensitive time for chief executive Marissa Mayer, as she navigates the company toward a planned US$4.8billion acquisition by Verizon, set to close by early next year. Mayer needs to keep users logging in to drive traffic and draw the advertising that fuels the company ’s revenue growth, which has been sluggish under her leadership.
Verizon was notified of the incident within the last two days, the company said in an emailed statement.
The confirmation that accounts were compromised came almost two months after the company said it was investigating claims that a hacker was offering to sell user account details stolen in a data breach. The same hacker, who previously sold data taken from LinkedIn and MySpace, posted information from 200 million Yahoo accounts on a dark web marketplace, Motherboard reported in August. The stolen information being offered for US$2,000 was most likely from 2012, Motherboard reported, citing the hacker, who uses the name Peace.
“All of this compromised information is very useful for criminals in order to hijack user identities and use them for fraudulent purposes,” Avivah Litan, an analyst with Gartner, said.
Yahoo is encouraging users to review their accounts for suspicious activity and to change password and security questions — along with answers for other online accounts where they use the same or similar information.
Many of the stolen accounts obtained by Motherboard were no longer in use and had been cancelled. The price suggested much of the information was obsolete.