Yahoo said on Thursday that information from at least 500 million of its user accounts was stolen in 2014 by what it believed was a state-sponsored actor, a theft that appeared to the biggest cyber breach ever. Cyber crooks may have stolen names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and encrypted passwords, the company said. Unprotected passwords, payment card data and bank account information did not appear to have been compromised, Yahoo said, signaling that some of the most valuable user data was not taken. Even in an era of massive data breaches, this one was spectacular and raises worrisome questions about the continued vulnerability of America's digital networks to increasingly sophisticated adversaries.
It was not immediately clearly when Yahoo learned of the hack and why it took two years to come to light. The size of the attack on Yahoo was unprecedented compared to other corporate breaches such as at eBay in 2014 which involved personal data of 145 million users. The Yahoo breach, which follows a rising number of other large-scale data breaches, could make it a watershed event that prompts the government and businesses alike to put more effort into bolstering defenses, said Dan Kaminsky, a well-known Internet security expert.
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