As the biggest known hack of all time, it appears to be a breach and leak of Yahoo company's accounts, as the exposed accounts were revealed to reach about 3 billion.
Yahoo , which was acquired by Verizon this year, now believes that the total number of accounts compromised in August 2013, and revealed last December, was not 1 billion , but 3 billion!!!! And so this particular hack is the largest in the entire history of the internet.
At the end of last year, Yahoo revealed that in August 2013 it had suffered a massive data breach, affecting 1 trillion user accounts. The leaked information included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, passwords, and in some cases, “encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers».
Back then, Yahoo confirmed that the hackers did not gather bank account details or credit card information linked to Yahoo accounts.
But on Tuesday, Verizon made the following announcement: “Following the acquisition of Yahoo by Verizon, and during the closing process, the company recently received new data and now believes, after investigation and with the assistance of external expert investigators, that all Yahoo user accounts were affected by the August 2013 theft.”
The statement clearly shows that if you had a Yahoo account in 2013, then your data has certainly been compromised.
Thus, for any reason, if you have not changed your password since then, you should change it now immediately and enable two-factor authentication (2FA).
Also, if you use the answers to security questions, change them immediately. This means that if you use these passwords or security answers on other accounts unrelated to Yahoo, the best thing you can do is to make changes immediately.
Deleting your Yahoo account is not a good choice, as the company deletes these accounts after 30 days, a fact that allows the hacker to infiltrate. So, even if you don’t want to use your Yahoo account, just enable two-factor authentication and leave it.
Yahoo has started notifying the owners of the accounts that are affected, asking them to change their passwords immediately, and assuring them that the stolen data «does not include passwords in plain text, card numbers, or bank accounts.»
It should be noted that this breach is different from the 2014 breach that also occurred at Yahoo, and which was revealed in September of last year, affecting as many as 500 million user accounts.
