Verizon, the new owner of Yahoo’s online services, has admitted that 3 Billion Yahoo accounts were hacked in the 2013 Yahoo data breach. In December 2016, yahoo admitted that 1 billion of its users’ accounts were compromised; it’s the largest on record as at 2016, which can now be referred to as the smallest going by the latest record of 3 billion.
Verizon revised the numbers after it “received new information from outside the company,” The Wall Street Journal reported. Every account held with Yahoo at the time of the breach, according to cybersecurity experts, is thought to have been affected.
How to protect your account
At this point, according to Tom’s guide, here are the few security measures you can take:
- Changing your password is recommended, and also adopt a good password manager to keep them all strong, secure and unique.
- If your Yahoo account is linked with your mobile devices, it’d be security-wise to unlink your mobile devices from your Yahoo accounts and then relink them again using new and strong passwords.
- You can also turn on two-factor authentication on Yahoo and on any other online service that allows it, such as Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple and Dropbox.
While two-factor authentication is still recommended for Yahoo services users, Google is already thinking differently as it plans to come up with the Advanced Protection Programme, a collection of features onto accounts such as email, including a new block on third-party applications from accessing data.
We hope that Verizon fills the security loopholes in the system it bought from Yahoo for a whopping sum of $4.5 Billion which has made it easy to attack for hackers. Some analysts say Verizon shouldn’t have bought Yahoo in the first place considering it vulnerability.
Technically, it means “many people who had Yahoo accounts in 2013-2014 had their account details stolen not once, but multiple times,” Tom’s guide says.
