The company says the investigation shows no signs of the hacker in its system now.
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Yahoo said the stolen information may have included names, email addresses, birth dates, and scrambled passwords, along with encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers that could help hackers break into victims’ other online accounts.
While there is no official record of the largest breaches, many analysts have called the Myspace hack revealed earlier this year as the largest to date, with 360 million users affected.
Continue to change your passwords often, and change your security questions and answers, because the hackers may have accessed them as well. The company said that the breach might have been carried out by a “state-sponsored actor”. The company said that it appeared more data was taken in the initial compromise and that the company was just learning about the larger amount through the hacker’s posting.
“The stolen Yahoo data is critical because it not only leads to a single system but to users’ connections to their banks, social media profiles, other financial services and users’ friends and family”, Holden told the New York Times.
Russian Federation has been linked to several recent United States hacks. It was as if they were reluctant to hand it over, he said.
“Most stories will focus on Yahoo users, but the damage there appears to have been done months ago, and Yahoo will simply reset all their passwords so no further damage can be done”, he said, in a statement emailed to FoxNews.com. The internet pioneer confirmed the breach in a statement today and is pointing the finger at a “state-sponsored actor”. Yahoo has started notifying its users, asking them to review their account for suspicious activities.
Confirmation of the major cyber breach comes two months after Yahoo sealed a deal to sell its core internet business to telecom giant Verizon for $4.8 billion, ending a two-decade run as an independent company.
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“That would give Verizon the opportunity to renegotiate the terms or potentially walk away from the transaction if it is a material change”. While that report turned out to be false, Yahoo’s investigation turned up the 2014 theft, according to a person familiar with the matter. “Whether it is a material change will depend in large part on what kind of information was compromised”, Caponi said. As Bloomberg News previously reported, senior leaders at JPMorgan Chase & Co. lobbied the White House and various federal agencies to attribute a hacking attack against the bank in 2014 as being sponsored by Russian Federation, but the FBI disagreed, and later filed criminal charges linking the breach to a stock pump-and-dump scheme, although there remained debate in the intelligence community about a possible government link.
