The Yahoo company announced it had experienced a data breach involving 500 million user accounts in September. Yahoo again falls prey to a breach of a billion user accounts. Yes, you read that right: one BILLION bills.
As Yahoo revealed earlier in November, police provided the company with data files that a third party claimed were Yahoo user data. The company analyzed this data with the help from outside forensic experts and found that it appears to be Yahoo user data. Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, Yahoo believes that an unauthorized third party stole data related to more than one billion user accounts in August 2013. The company has been unable to identify the break-in related to this theft. Yahoo believes this incident is likely different from the one the company disclosed on September 22, 2016.
Yahoo believes the stolen information includes full names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, hashed passwords, and may include security questions and answers.
Fortunately, Yahoo does not store credit card or other payment information in the affected system.
2016 the year of cyber theft
2016 appears to be the year of "cyber theft," with us reporting on eight major breaches affecting well-known companies. Big data is a big money-maker for hackers, so they're targeting companies that tend to store large amounts of personally identifiable information about their customers, such as Social Security numbers, dates of birth, home addresses, and even medical records. It's easy for a victim of cybercrime to report credit card fraud and simply get a new card number. However, if it's a Social Security number, you're tied to it for life. Social Security numbers open the door to all sorts of identity theft.
What Yahoo is doing to protect their users
The company is currently identifying and notifying potentially affected users and directing them to change their passwords immediately. In addition to informing users, they remove all unencrypted security questions and answers from the affected accounts, so that cyber criminals cannot use those answers to break into user accounts.
How to protect your accounts:
In such situations, we cannot emphasize enough the importance of using secure passwords. Here are a few tips for choosing a secure password:
We understand it can be difficult to remember dozens of complicated passwords for multiple websites; However, cyber criminals rely on password reuse to gain access to other accounts. One way to get around the annoyance of remembering all those unique passwords is by using a secure password manager, like Norton Identity Safe.
Another great way to protect your account is like two-step verification. Two-step verification is a method of verifying your identity in addition to your username and password. With two-factor authentication, you are prompted to provide one of the following:
You can also visit Yahoo's Security Center page to learn more about securing your account. Yahoo also offers a Yahoo Account Key. Overall similar to two-factor authentication.