There was speculation that the fallout from the hack may have implications for Verizon’s $4.8bn (£3.7bn) purchase of Yahoo. “Yahoo has never had reason to believe there is any connection between the security issue disclosed yesterday and the claims publicized by a hacker in August 2016”.
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But, Yahoo said, fortunately, hackers could not find any bank account or credit card information.
“They’d have the ability to conduct targeted phishing attacks against individuals with potentially valuable information, without going through their government email accounts”, said Tim Erlin, senior director of security and risk strategy at Tripwire, a cyber-security firm.
Schwartz’s lawyers filed the lawsuit in San Jose, California, one of the USA states with the most strict set of data breach rules, and Yahoo’s native state.
Bruce Schneier, reacting to this recent attack on Yahoo, said, “This is the biggest data breach ever”.
Internet service provider Yahoo acknowledged on Thursday that the account information of at least 500 million users was hacked and stolen in late 2014. We don’t know how the bad guys broke in.
“With state-sponsored attacks, it’s not just financial information that’s of value”, said Lance Hoffman, co-director of the Cyberspace Security and Privacy Institute at George Washington University.
Some analysts warn that “state sponsored” can be a vague term.
Yahoo demonstrated “reckless disregard for the security of its users’ personal information that it promised to protect”, according to the complaint.
The on-going 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.
“People have to realize that anything they put out there is fair game”, he said, stressing a need for internet users to remain wary.
NY resident Ronald Schwartz on behalf of all Yahoo users in America, whose personal information was compromised, has filed the lawsuit on Friday (23 September) in the federal court in San Jose, California. Those hackers stole client names, email addresses, birthdates, telephone numbers, and passwords as Yahoo informs.
It was not immediately clear if the data breach could impact the closing of the deal or the price agreed by Verizon.
“I imagine this will be the end of Yahoo, not that it was thriving to begin with”, she said. He is asking the court to order Yahoo to compensate users for any damages resulting from fraud and also pay for measures to identify and safeguard compromised accounts. In such cases, intelligence officials might share useful commercial secrets with their home-grown industries, said Jeremiah Grossman, an official at SentinelOne, a Silicon Valley computer security firm.
“Within the last two days, we were notified of Yahoo’s security incident”, Verizon said in a statement.
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In a statement, Verizon said: “We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities”.
