Yahoo Inc. has uncovered another massive cyber attack in which personal data of 1 billion users was compromised in the year 2013, making it the biggest cyber breach in history. The data includes names, emails, telephone numbers and password of all the victims and this is not the first time that Yahoo has revealed such breach as in September 2016, the company said that over 500 million accounts were hacked by a third party in 2014.
Also Read: Yahoo Suffered The Biggest Security Breach
Yahoo Officials said that the hackers behind this attack may have learned to forge ‘cookies’, that allows them to breach an account without the password. However, after the earlier revelation, Yahoo urged all the users to change their passwords and if the above statement is true, every account on Yahoo’s portal may be vulnerable to future hacking.
Out of the one billion affected, 1,50,000 accounts belongs to US Government and Military employees including White House employees, FBI agents, Central Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency and employees of every US military branch. This has made the whole US vulnerable and poses an imminent threat to the most powerful nation in the world.
Yahoo is yet to identify the intruder and said that the payment card and bank account data was not stored in the affected system, making it resilient to the threat.
This breach is the biggest setback for Yahoo, once a $100 Billion company, as the .com is already struggling to survive against competitors like Google Inc and Facebook.
Apparently, this was the same reason why Yahoo’s representatives were not invited to a summit hosted by US President Donald Trump where executives of Google, Facebook, and other US tech companies met the President-Elect.
This cyber breach has made matter worse for Yahoo as Verizon Communication Inc is all set to take over the company and after the 2014 breach announcement, the latter has already diminished the takeover value to $4.83 billion. Moreover, Verizon may back out from the agreement considering the latest developments.
At the end of the day, why Yahoo took this long to uncover the breach and if the company was aware of the attack, why didn’t it reveal it earlier? The answer to these questions remains a mystery to many.
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15 December 2016
Rohan Jaitly