Because more than 500 million accounts were hacked, that’s expected to take a while.
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The only bright side, however, is that the breach did not include financial information, such as credit card numbers or bank accounts, the company added.
The search engine company, which is in the process of selling itself to the broadband telecommunications company Verizon, stated that they are working closely with law enforcement regarding the hacking incident.
“I’ve actually changed my password since this breach in 2014, but regardless I’m never happy to hear about something like this”, said Mike Rhode of Arlington, Va., a user of Flickr and Yahoo Groups.
Stephen Gates, chief research intelligence analyst at network security firm NSFocus, said: “In 2012, the number of potentially compromised user credentials was estimated to be around 450,000”.
The comments were the first confirmation from Yahoo on the huge data breach, and come after a report earlier this year quoting a security researcher saying some 200 million accounts may have been accessed.
These sites create a unique password for each website you visit and store them in a database protected by a master password that you create.
On Thursday Yahoo confirmed over 500 million user accounts and passwords were stolen by hackers.
Attorney Shawn Tuma is a cybersecurity expert and tells 21 News, “Use a password that has a combination of letters, both upper and lower case that’s not something you would find in a dictionary”. Be sure also to audit all your other online accounts which use the same password as your Yahoo! account.
A Sky spokesperson referred us to Twitter, where it has tweeted the following: “If you have a Sky email account we recommend changing your password and security questions online”.
Sky, which owns Sky News, said: “Sky takes the security of our customers’ data and information extremely seriously”.
“If this breach was Gmail, that would be a different story because I have my bank accounts, brokerage accounts, Linkedin accounts all connected”.
In addition, users need to think about passwords and security questions from other accounts on which they gave the same or similar information used for their Yahoo account and possibly change them as well.
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“That’s where you enter you password and they send you a text message to confirm it is really you”.
