Latest Yahoo Hack Includes Personal Data of Government, Military Officials

If the hacks cause a user backlash against Yahoo, the company’s services wouldn’t be as valuable to Verizon.

Yahoo did say that the latest breach did not include financial information, nor the accounts of its blogging service Tumblr. By contrast, staying with Yahoo means those accounts that were breached would be forced to reset their passwords, among other security measures.

The biggest concern being raised right now is that the tech giant failed to detect the breach when it happened in 2013, and has only now revealed details after being notified by a third-party.

If you’ve ever had an account, even one you haven’t used for 10 or 15 years, your information may have been at risk for more than three years. “Yahoo badly screwed up”.

At the very least, the security lapses “definitely will help Verizon in its negotiations to lower the price, ” Gartner analyst Avivah Litan predicted.

“Yahoo has now won the gold medal and the silver medal for the worst hacks in history”, said Hemu Nigam, CEO of online security consultancy SSP Blue.

Won’t security questions protect my data?

Yahoo’s security breakdowns could turn into expensive deal breakers for the Sunnyvale, California, company.

Since strong, unique passwords are a huge pain to memorize, Ghosemajumder recommends using a password manager. “That being said, they should change all their passwords”. “No one should have faith in Yahoo at this point”. In the latest incident, the company said that stolen user data may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, passwords and possibly security questions. While data breaches have become depressingly common, the incident reported by Yahoo is especially worrisome because of the enormous scope of those affected, as well as the sensitive nature of information leaked. “We will review the impact of this new development before reaching any final conclusions”, the company was quoted in the Wall Street Journal.

Yahoo also.found.that someone had found a way to forge web browser “cookies” that would allow them to gain access to users’ accounts without logging in.Yahoo.informed users whose accounts were exposed by the forged cookies.has “invalidated” the cookies and “hardened our systems to secure against similar attacks.”

Platforms like 1Password or LastPass generate and store passwords and security answers for every account you have, so you only have to remember a single master password.

But the company said hackers may have also stolen passwords from the affected accounts.

Turn on two-factor authentication on all of your accounts, including Yahoo. “These are the sorts of questions that ask you where you first went to school or what the name of your first pet was”.

Since generating and remembering a bunch of long, complex, passwords is hard, security experts recommend using a password manager.

Click on YES Terminate this Account. It tells you where “you” tried to sign-in from, using your password, and suggests that you create an app password to verify your identity.

The latest user data stolen from Yahoo is believed to include account information from “more than 150,000 US government and military employees”, according to a report by Bloomberg yesterday evening.

For more news, visit Bloomberg.