Yahoo caused a stir almost a year ago where they said that hackers had stolen data from a billion user accounts. This was a jump from the 200 million and 500 million figures they had said previously and it seems this figure still keeps rising.
We thought that the 1 billion figure Yahoo announced was large enough as a breach, but now it is worse than that. Now Yahoo is announcing that the entire Yahoo user account base was affected by the hack, that is 3 billion accounts!
“Subsequent to Yahoo’s acquisition by Verizon, and during integration, the company recently obtained new intelligence and now believes, following an investigation with the assistance of outside forensic experts, that all Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft,” they explained in a post.
Yahoo says that the user account information stolen did not include passwords in clear text, bank account information or payment card data. They are also sending email notifications to the additional affected user accounts.
This latest revelation reveals several things where it seems like Yahoo seemed like they wanted to soften the blow of this incident which has come to light after they were bought out by Verizon.
Although they says that there were no clear text passwords and payment information was obtained, this still means that 3 billion Yahoo accounts are out there in the wild for use by hackers. Hackers usually use such databases to sell your information and thankfully there are people who compile such databases to see if your password or email address is among the ones that have leaked.
This means now you might need to stop using your Yahoo mail from now on and use the other mailing services. If you
