All 3 Billion Yahoo Accounts Hacked

 

Last year Yahoo announced that they had been hacked back in 2013 and that the hackers had stolen information that affected over one billion of its accounts.

Yahoo has now revealed that the massive cyberattack it suffered in 2013 was greater than they anticipated and that it had affected all 3 billion of its accounts that existed at the time of the attack.

The information that was taken according to Yahoo “may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.”

Card data and bank account information, however, were not part of the leak, the new investigation confirmed.

At the time of the attack, Yahoo notified everyone with an account and required them to reset their passwords. However, for the millions (possibly billions) of people who have had a Yahoo account in the past but don’t use it anymore, this isn’t likely to have been done.

At one point, basically everyone had a Yahoo account which means if you ever had an account, somewhere there is a database with all those usernames, email addresses and passwords.

The risk for a great deal of us is that this means a hacker can take an email address and password and run it against websites like Facebook, Google or even PayPal so if you are someone who tends to recycle old passwords you may be at risk!  

So if you think you may have used an old password for any of your active accounts online you should change them immediately.