This is a weird place to use implicated as it makes the reader think those billion users are to blame for the hack. If that's true, it's a human-scale DDOS - no IoT devices needed.
IRS Says More Taxpayers May Have Been Hacked http://time.com/4000659/irs-taxpayer-hacked-cybercrime/
It wasn't the taxpayers that were hacked - it was the IRS.
Hackers stole personal information from 104,000 taxpayers, IRS says https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/federal-eye/wp/2015/05/2...
Hackers did not steal personal information from 104,000 taxpayers - they stole it from the IRS.
Smaller media outlets often get it right:
Over 700,000 People Got Screwed in Last Year's IRS Data Breach http://gizmodo.com/over-700-000-people-got-screwed-in-last-y...
I made that mistake last time, "deleted" my yahoo account when there was a breach, promptly forgot about doing that, then about 75 days later another breach was announced, so I logged in to "delete" my account....now I have to wait another 90 days before it's gone.
I would however never actually delete the account.
My concern with deleting the account is that it exposes you to some really nasty impersonation attacks. It is free to keep. Just keep it.
Certainly lots of very confused people keep seeing it.
We are writing to inform you about a data security issue that may involve your Yahoo account information. We have taken steps to secure your account and are working closely with law enforcement.
What happened?
In November 2016, law enforcement provided Yahoo with data files which a third party claimed was Yahoo user data. We analysed this data with the assistance of external forensic experts and found that it appears to be Yahoo user data. Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, we believe that an unauthorised third party stole data associated with a broader set of user accounts in August 2013, including yours. We have not been able to identify the intrusion associated with this theft. We believe that this incident is likely distinct from the one that we disclosed on 22 September 2016.
What information was involved?
The stolen user account information 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. Not all of these data elements may have been present for your account. The investigation indicates that the stolen information did not include passwords in clear text form, payment card data or bank account information. Payment card data and bank account information are not stored on the system that we believe was affected.
What we're doing
We are taking action to protect our users: We are requiring potentially affected users to change their passwords. We invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account. We are constantly enhancing our safeguards and systems that detect and prevent unauthorised access to user accounts. What you can do
We encourage you to follow these security recommendations: Change your passwords and security questions and answers for any other accounts on which you used the same or similar information used for your Yahoo account. Review all of your accounts for suspicious activity. Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your personal information or refer you to a web page asking for personal information. Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails. In addition, please consider using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password on Yahoo altogether.
For more information
For more information about this issue and our security resources, please visit the Yahoo Account security issues FAQs page available at https://help.yahoo.com/kb/index?locale=en_AU&page=content&y=.... Protecting your information is important to us and we are constantly working to strengthen our defences.
Yours sincerely,
Bob Lord Chief Information Security Officer Yahoo
This is just a case of poor management, if Google, Facebook, Twitter and others can figure out how to secure their sites, Yahoo can.
The other article linked in this thread[1] attributes this attack to a "state-sponsored actor", which is interesting considering that Google was hacked by such an actor [2], but I'm not sure they ever acknowledged it.
I doubt anyone can say for sure that Facebook and/or Twitter haven't been hacked in such a way. If anything, all we can say is that we haven't heard about it.
[1] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/16/yahoo-hack-...
[2] http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2013/10/30/nsa_smile...
Google is definitely more secure and more proactive at security than Yahoo. You can look through their security whitepaper: they take a systematic approach and they meet and exceed the state of the art.[2] In contrast, Yahoo was hashing passwords with MD5. Here's Ptacek saying "there is no redeeming quality to justify using MD5", in 2007.[3] Yahoo doesn't really have any excuse.
[1] https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2016/09/the_hacking_o...
[2] https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5Y-fwYJF2hLOTVmMzQ1MjAtMDF...
[3] https://web.archive.org/web/http://www.matasano.com/log/958/...
(I'm not affiliated with any of these companies.)
Open up any random NIST, ISO or even PCI doc to see what is involved above and beyond bug squashing.
a) didn't know the company was hacked.
b) claimed they didn't know they were hacked,
c) didn't bother to do proper discovery to quantify the extent of the hack until years later.
EDIT: This seems like a better source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/2017/02/16/yahoo-hack-...
That's surely a death knell for Yahoo, as if it needed another?
