Articles about Yahoo

The massive data theft from Yahoo in 2013 is even bigger than first thought. It was big enough when it was believed to have affected around a billion users, but Yahoo has now provided an update indicating that the number is in fact three billion. Or, to put it another way, every single Yahoo user.

Yahoo, now part of Oath, has issued a statement in which it stresses that the updated figure does not represent "a new security issue" and that plaintext passwords were not accessed. The biggest data breach in history just got even bigger, and it's going to take a lot for Yahoo, Oath and Verizon -- the new owner -- to move on from it.

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Verizon today reveals that it has completed the acquisition of Yahoo, nearly a year after announcing the deal. Big red initially agreed to pay $4.83 billion, but after the massive security breach that resulted in over one billion hacked accounts was disclosed to the public the value dropped to $4.48 billion.

What is interesting is that Yahoo will not operate as an individual subsidiary, as you might expect. Instead, Verizon will combine it with AOL under a different brand, called Oath, which it describes as a "diverse house of more than 50 media and technology brands that engages more than a billion people around the world."

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In case you haven't been following the news about 23-year-old Internet company acquisitions, Verizon announced 11 months ago that it had entered into an agreement to buy Yahoo for $4.83 billion. That deal, with some modifications, was officially approved and finalized yesterday, and it is expected to be completely closed on June 13.

When that happens, the telecommunications giant plans to combine those newly acquired assets with AOL, which it also owns, into a new media conglomerate. And of course, when you hear the word "combine," the next word you'll hear is "layoffs."

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The US Justice Department is charging two Russian spies and two hackers with orchestrating the attack against Yahoo in 2014 that saw 500 million accounts being compromised as part of an effort to collect intelligence.

The Justice Department says that Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin "and other known and unknown" FSB intelligence officers hired hackers Alexsey Beland and Karim Baratov to hack Yahoo accounts belonging to Russian journalists, officials, and employees of a "prominent" security company, as well as US officials and employees of tech companies.

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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is not going to receive her annual bonus this year as the company punishes her for failing to react quickly enough to a security breach in 2014. Her bonus is to be shared between staff instead.

The security breach, followed by another in 2016 involving the use of forged cookies, meant Yahoo's sale to Verizon had to be renegotiated, slashing millions of dollars from the price. The company has revealed that around 32 million user accounts were accessed using forged cookies, and while this is nothing like the 500 million accounts affected by the 2014 breach, it rocked faith in Yahoo and Mayer felt it best to also pass on her stock award.

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Yahoo's frankly terrible track record with security just cost the company $350 million. Having originally offered to buy the company for $4.83 billion, Verizon has now revealed that it is dropping its offer to $4.48 billion.

The announcement from Verizon comes just days after it was rumored that the company was thinking of lowering its offer by $250 million in the wake of security breaches suffered by Yahoo. The two companies have also agreed to share "certain legal and regulatory liabilities arising from certain data breaches."

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Yahoo -- or, rather, its users -- have not been doing very well recently when it comes to security. Having already revealed details of a huge historic attack that led to the theft of details for millions of accounts, Yahoo is now notifying an unknown number of users that their accounts may have been breached by hackers using forged cookies.

At the same time, Bloomberg is suggesting that the impending deal with Verizon has been renegotiated. The latest revelations coupled with the previous security issues could have just cost Yahoo $250 million.

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Yahoo's mobile analytics arm Flurry has released its State of Mobile report for 2016, looking at mobile app activity and trends from the last year.

Over the last year, Flurry tracked more than 940,000 applications, across 2.1 billion devices, in 3.2 trillion sessions. Compared to 2015 overall app usage grew by 11 percent and time-spent in apps grew by 69 percent.

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The latest reports on the data breach revelations at Yahoo, suggest that the company lost data for more than one billion users as far back as August 2013 and that the data is suspected to contain names, email addresses, hashed passwords, security questions and associated answers. In addition, Yahoo has stated that the attackers have accessed Yahoo proprietary code used to generate cookies for user access without credentials.

This major breach raises a number of questions, including: why did it take so long to identify and notify authorities about it? What are the implications for Yahoo users? What might this mean for Yahoo going forward? And what can other companies learn from these events?

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The European Union is not happy with the explanation Yahoo has given for scanning user emails for US intelligence. There is concern about how such surveillance could impact upon not only privacy, but also business between the EU and US, and trust has to be built from scratch as Donald Trump becomes president.

Yahoo -- which is on the verge of being sold to Verizon -- is not signed up to the EU-U.S. Privacy Shield agreement that blocks the US from spying on European data. As such, the company has been acting on a previously-secret court order, gathering data for the NSA and FBI. Speaking with Reuters, the EU Justice Commissioner said she wants more information about what was gathered and why.

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Things are all change at Yahoo. The sale of the company to Verizon appears to be going ahead -- despite a series of setbacks along the way, including a high-profile data breach -- for $4.83 billion, and when the deal does go through, Marissa Mayer will step down from the board.

While many news reports today state that Yahoo is now called (or will be) Altaba, this is not strictly true. Verizon is not buying Yahoo in its entirety; a 15 percent stake in Alibaba and a 35.5 percent stake in Yahoo Japan will live on as an investment company going under the new name of Altaba Inc. Details of the changes are revealed in an SEC filing.

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Yahoo, one of the earliest and brightest dot-coms, is a Hellhole at the close of 2016. It stinks of decay and neglect. The 1 billion active user accounts ravaged by hackers is a metaphor for the trendy neighborhood turned into gang-ridden slum. Verizon was, or maybe still is, buying Yahoo. Walk away, I say, unless Yahoo is willing to pay for the privilege of becoming part of the expanding VZN communications and media empire.

I typically make many changes at the start of the new year, and as 2017 begins, I take my advice offered to Verizon: Abandon Yahoo. First to go is its photo-sharing site, for many of the reasons stated seven months ago. My Flickr Pro account expires in September, and I will cancel a few weeks earlier to prevent auto-renewal. In the meantime, I consider my Flickr officially closed, and I will no longer use it. All photos will remain until the service makes them unavailable—and pursuant to the terms,

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As we reported earlier this week Yahoo has suffered yet another major security breach. This will have sent many users scurrying to change their passwords, but what else can you do to protect your account?

Adam Levin, chairman and founder of identity protection specialist IDT911 suggests that users need to start telling lies. He doesn't mean lying about the fact that you have a Yahoo account -- though given the severity of breaches it has suffered that might save you some embarrassment. No, he means telling lies in the answers to your security questions.

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I’m writing this post on Wednesday evening here in California. Normally I wouldn’t point that out but in this case I want to put a kind of timestamp on my writing because at this moment we’re at the end of the second day of a concerted attack by the UAE Electronic Army on various DNS providers in North America. If you follow this stuff and bother to check, say, Google News right now for "UAE Electronic Army", your search will probably generate some Facebook entries but no news at all because -- two days into it -- this attack has gone unnoticed by the world at large. My last column was about fake news. This one is about real news you never hear about.

We have a great example of such news this week in the Yahoo one billion account hack. Sure, it’s all over the web but it happened in 2013. Are we really supposed to believe that one billion user records were stolen from Yahoo and it took three years for somebody to notice??? The story is that law enforcement  officials came across the stolen data, or some of it, and took it to Yahoo for verification. Maybe, but having written these stories for 30 years I think it is much more likely that somebody already knew about the breach and simply chose not to say when it happened. This is not to say that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer knew or didn’t know about the breach, just that shit happens and often isn’t reported if jobs are perceived as being on the line.

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Here we go again. Friggin' Yahoo. Sigh.

Earlier this year, the company announced that 500 million Yahoo accounts were hacked in a massive breach. This was very upsetting, as it happened back in 2014, meaning users were not made aware for years. Today, an entirely different hack is brought to light. It is even worse than the previously announced breach, as it happened a year earlier (in 2013), and it impacts twice as many accounts -- more than one billion!

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