You could have a Yahoo account without even knowing it

A website like haveibeenpwned.com can let you know if your email account and the personal information attached to it have been involved in a hack.

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The impact is already far reaching. “Yahoo is also recommending that users who haven’t changed their passwords since 2014 do so”.

Could this happen again?

More information about the data breach and how users should respond is available from Yahoo here. “Worst case scenario, they get into my account and drop Jamaal Charles”, he said, making a quip about the star Kansas City running back.

Yahoo is under pressure to release more details on the attack and explain why it took so long to detect.

This current assault on Yahoo is huge in size and three times larger than attacks on sites such as eBay Inc (EBAY.O).This hacking incident comes at a time when Yahoo is passing through a hard phase in the tech industry. Yahoo is blaming the hack on a “state-sponsored actor”. The account information of at least 500 million users was stolen by hackers in 2014, including names, email addresses, passwords, telephone numbers, and answers to some security questions.

However, it’s unlikely the stolen information included payment card data or bank account information, as neither was stored on the affected system, the company said.

Yahoo is urging account users to immediately change their passwords and security questions and answers, especially if you haven’t updated them since 2014.

Computer security analyst Graham Cluley said the stolen Yahoo data “could be useful ammunition for any hacker attempting to break into Yahoo accounts, or interested in exploring whether users might have used the same security questions/answers to protect themselves elsewhere on the web”. Yahoo has also invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so they can not be used to access an account.

“Make sure you not only change it on Yahoo, but if you use the same password on any other site, which you shouldn’t do, but many people do, go ahead and change your passwords across the board and try to make them unique”, said Magid.

“There’s some pundits who say we’re going to feel the ripple of this for years”, said Dwayne Williams, the Associate Director of Technology and Research with UTSA’s Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security.