Yahoo discovers another Hack, 1 Billion accounts Affected this time

The Yahoo hack seems to be the gift (curse?) that keeps on giving. This is in light of the news that the company has discovered a 3-year-old security breach that enabled a hacker to compromise more than 1 billion user accounts.

This breach has made it so that Yahoo has broken the record of the biggest hack in history set by-- Yahoo.

The hack occurred in 2013, making it even older than the hack that Yahoo initially announced which affected half of the 1 Billion number hit by this one.

"It's shocking," security expert Avivah Litan of Gartner Inc.

Both lapses occurred during the reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, a once-lauded leader who found herself unable to turn around the company in the four years since her arrival.

Yahoo didn't say if it believes the same hacker might have pulled off two separate attacks. The Sunnyvale, California, company blamed the late 2014 attack on a hacker affiliated with an unidentified foreign government, but said it hasn't been able to identify the source behind the 2013 intrusion.

Yahoo has more than a billion monthly active users.

In both attacks, the stolen information included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and security questions and answers. The company says it believes bank-account information and payment-card data were not affected.

But hackers also apparently stole passwords in both attacks. Technically, those passwords should be secure; Yahoo said they were scrambled twice — once by encryption and once by another technique called hashing. But hackers have become adept at cracking secured passwords by assembling huge dictionaries of similarly scrambled phrases and matching them against stolen password databases.

The problem with this is that those who have used their Yahoo passwords for other online accounts. Those who had changed theirs before  September should be fine.

This naturally causes a problem for Yahoo with their impending partnership with Verizon now on the rocks due to this revelation. It remains to be seen what happens going forward now for Yahoo.