Yahoo is having a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day. The company has announced that personal information from some 500 million users was stolen way back in 2014. Thanks a huge number of users and a very long time to wait to act, but it may be that they only recently found out about the hack.
The company is currently notifying affected users, so be sure to check you Yahoo account to find out if you are on of the 500 million. I don’t use Yahoo, but my parents do so I was on the phone making sure they checked their email and changed passwords just to be safe.
What’s worse is that this is more than some dude in their basement hacking Yahoo for the lulz. The company is saying that this was a “state-sponsored attack” and was targeting for the purpose of stealing personal information. Yahoo made clear that no bank information or credit card information was breached, but I suggest being safe and changing all your passwords and perhaps setting up alerts on any credit card accounts that were ever used through Yahoo.
You can read the official statement from Yahoo below:
A recent investigation by Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor. The 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. 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 has found to be affected. Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter.
The best thing you can do is get yourself a good password manager and help secure everything you do online. Lifehacker has a really great article covering this and I suggest checking it out.
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