News of the additional hack further jeopardizes Yahoo's plans to fall into Verizon's arms. That means most Yahoo users probably don't have anything to worry about, said J.J. One big tell: It doesn't appear that much personal data from Yahoo accounts has been posted for sale online, meaning the hack probably wasn't the work of ordinary criminals. Security experts said the 2013 attack was likely the work of a foreign government fishing for information about specific people. (You may get a reprieve if you've changed your password and questions since September.) Yahoo is requiring users to change their passwords and invalidating security questions so they can't be used to hack into accounts. That could mean trouble for any users who reused their Yahoo password for other online accounts. But hackers have become adept at cracking secured passwords by assembling huge dictionaries of similarly scrambled phrases and matching them against stolen password databases. Technically, those passwords should be secure Yahoo said they were scrambled twice - once by encryption and once by another technique called hashing. The company says it believes bank-account information and payment-card data were not affected.īut hackers also apparently stole passwords in both attacks. In both attacks, the stolen information included names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdates and security questions and answers. An unknown number of accounts were affected by both hacks. Yahoo has more than a billion monthly active users, although some have multiple accounts and others have none at all. The Sunnyvale, California, company blamed the late 2014 attack on a hacker affiliated with an unidentified foreign government, but said it hasn't been able to identify the source behind the 2013 intrusion. Yahoo didn't say if it believes the same hacker might have pulled off two separate attacks. Earlier this year, Yahoo agreed to sell its digital operations to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion - a deal that may now be imperiled by the hacking revelations. 'It's shocking,' security expert Avivah Litan of Gartner Inc.īoth lapses occurred during the reign of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, a once-lauded leader who found herself unable to turn around the company in the four years since her arrival. That breach affected at least 500 million users, which had been the most far-reaching hack until the latest revelation.

The digital heist disclosed Wednesday occurred in August 2013, more than a year before a separate hack that Yahoo announced nearly three months ago.

SAN FRANCISCO - Yahoo has discovered a 3-year-old security breach that enabled a hacker to compromise more than 1 billion user accounts, breaking the company's own humiliating record for the biggest security breach in history.

Hack yahoo password online free 2015