Yahoo confirmed that while most user passwords were encrypted and not visible to hackers, many security questions and answers linked to accounts were.
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“Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen, and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is now in Yahoo’s network”.
Several users said they were closing their accounts.
A Yahoo spokeswoman said the Sunnyvale, California-based company does not discuss pending litigation.
“They should have been more on top of this”, said Hollister, 56. More recently, news reports say USA intelligence officials have blamed Russian spies for the hack of Democratic National Committee files, although Russia’s government has also denied this. Accounts at banks, retailers and elsewhere could be vulnerable.
Just because you don’t have a Yahoo email account doesn’t mean you’re off the hook. “We don’t yet know all the details of how this hack happened, but there is a sobering and important message here for companies that acquire and handle personal data”.
That concern was echoed in Washington.
“The U.S. authorities will be looking to track down the hackers, but it is our job to ask serious questions of Yahoo on behalf of British citizens and I am doing that today”, the United Kingdom privacy regulator said Friday. The company plans to brief Warner next week about the attack, his office said.
Thorsheim said the other issue is that there are probably millions of people who have forgotten about a Yahoo email account they used to have.
The company has been losing users, traffic and ad revenue in recent years and over the summer agreed to sell its core internet business for $4.8 billion to Verizon. 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.
Furious that the company had not protected its customers’ data better, she said she thought this could be yet another blow for the email service, which has been overtaken in popularity by Google’s Gmail over the last decade.
But Cody Littlewood, who owns a start-up incubator in Miami Beach, was one of several users who said it was precisely because of the decline in the use of Yahoo’s services that they were not anxious about the hack.
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“Both of my NFL fantasy leagues use Yahoo because the only thing that Yahoo does well is the fantasy league”.
