A 2014 Yahoo breach exposed 500 million accounts, including names, emails, birthdates, and hashed passwords. Identity-theft expert Robert Siciliano warns users to change reused passwords, as law enforcement investigates possible state-sponsored involvement.
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It may be one of the largest cybersecurity breaches ever. Tonight, Yahoo says up to 500 million email accounts were compromised 2 years ago. So why did the company wait until today to release the information? Here's Fox 20 Vice Jackie Heimrich, new at 10.
The issue here is hacked access to email addresses and passwords means that information could be used to get to your credit card accounts and your bank accounts. And if you're the kind of person who uses the same password for multiple accounts, this could be especially risky for You. Yahoo's information security experts believe the hack actually happened back in 2014, and for the last 2 years, some 500 million Yahoo email account details were exposed. Everything from names and email addresses to dates of birth, security questions, and hashed passwords.
Well, this is by far the largest data breach ever.
Robert Siciliano, identity theft expert with Hotspot Shield, says that means even if you're not an active email user of Yahoo, you should change your password for your old account and play it safe by updating other account passwords that were the same.
Whenever data breaches like this occur, there are ne'er-do-wells, criminal hackers that have access to our information, and they're reselling that to other criminals that are accessing our accounts and liquidating bank accounts and credit card accounts as a result.
Yahoo says they're working with law enforcement to get to the bottom of it, with some suggesting the hack could even have been state-sponsored since it was so widespread.
When they say state-sponsored hacker, that generally means that someone like Russia or China, they basically pay one of their citizen hackers to break into these databases. Whether or not that's the case, we don't really know. The fact of the matter is, uh, there's buzz around it, and more than likely the Obama administration will get involved.
Yahoo officials say that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card information, or bank account information. Those elements were not stored in the affected system. Jackie Heinrich, Fox 25 News.
