New Bigger Yahoo Breach from 2013 Affects 1 Billion Users

Yahoo again has disclosed a data breach. Yes, this is indeed a new one and is much larger and separate from the one disclosed in September that affected 500 million user accounts. The hackers in this one pulled no punches and took off with information on over 1 billion users. However, information is still coming in, so that number is subject to change. If it does, it unfortunately will likely go up.

The company revealed the news this week saying an unauthorized third party stole the information, which included names, email addresses, birth dates, phone numbers, encrypted passwords, and possibly the answers to the security questions. The more information a criminal has on an individual, the better chances they have in scamming the person, opening a credit card under that person's name or stealing their identity.

Users who have Yahoo accounts should change passwords to those accounts immediately. In addition, if those passwords are used for any other online accounts, change those as well. Always use unique passwords for all online accounts to prevent those from being re-used by cyber thieves to get into other accounts. Password reuse has been successful and has been blamed for many breaches including the UK National Lottery, Spotify, and Cici’s Pizza.  And while you are at it, change the security questions and answers for all of your Yahoo accounts.

Because phishing is one of the most successful ways that breaches occur and malware finds its way onto systems, always watch for additional spam and phishing attempts after a large data theft such as this one. Spammers use the email addresses to both send spam from those accounts and to target the email addresses. If you are not expecting an attachment or link in an email, regardless of whether or not you know the sender, always view it with suspicion. Contact the sender using the phone or a separate email (don’t reply) if you are not 100% certain it’s real and safe. And don’t provide sensitive, personal, or confidential information in email messages. This is not a secure form of communication even if it's supposedly encrypted and anything sent this way should be considered as fair game to be read by someone else.

This data was stolen in August of 2013. The company is investigating the possibility that forged cookies were created to allow and intruder to get access to the accounts without passwords. Cookies are text files that contain information about users and websites visited. They are retained on computers to identify users, shopping cart information, and to prepare web pages that may be more useful to the end-user. They also are used to remember names and other information for the auto-fill features on a next visit to a website. They are not dangerous in and of themselves, but some people prefer to disable them due to privacy concerns.

Yahoo has not identified the source of this intrusion and is continuing to investigate and the company will be notifying affected users. It has also invalidated the forged cookies.

© Copyright 2016 Stickley on Security