Yahoo! admitted today that the previous data breach was just a warm-up act. The latest bad news reveals that user data recovered by authorities uncovered a different hack entirely. Now there are over a billion compromised accounts. Yes, I said a BILLION!
This the second record breaking data breach of Yahoo! customer data. The previous hack endangered more than 500 million Yahoo! accounts. It took years for that breach to come to light.
Bob Lord, Yahoo!’s Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) said, in a press release, “As we previously disclosed in November, law enforcement provided us with data files that a third party claimed was Yahoo! user data. Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, we believe an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with more than one billion user accounts.”
Yes, you read that right. More than a billion Yahoo! customer accounts have been vulnerable for over 3 years now.
It seems that Yahoo! employees simply don’t give a damn. Yahoo! admitted that some employees were aware of the breach announced in September as early as 2014. But someone inside Yahoo! decided to dropped the investigation.
Yahoo! has advised, as it has before, that “potentially affected users” change their passwords. Clearly Yahoo! has some serious security issues. At one time Yahoo! was one of the biggest, most well known and respected Internet companies. My how times have changed.
Now the company may die a sad death. At one time Verizon was considering buying the failing company but that could change and there are few other suitors. According to Business Insider Yahoo! has admitted that Verizon may very well back out of the deal after this latest news.
Craig Siliman,Verizon’s chief lawyer, told reporters that the telecom giant has a “reasonable basis” to believe that Yahoo!’s monstrous data breach is equal to a material impact that lets Verizon trash the $4.83 billion deal.
If that were to happen we could witness the death of the first giant Internet company. It would be historic but no unprecedented in the business world. You remember PanAm Airlines don’t you?
