It’s business as usual at Yahoo, with another massive account breach that impacts over one billion users. The first massive (but smaller in scale–“only” 500 million) breach was disclosed in September, but surprisingly, the latest breach actually occurred in 2013.
And we’re being told now? Really?
Clearly Yahoo does care more about their PR than your security.
I suppose it makes sense for Marissa Mayer, the CEO who stepped into her role in July 2012. That would be bad PR for her too.
Where does a company go from here?
Needless to say, the breach might make the future of the company uncertain. Earlier this year, Verizon announced plans to acquire Yahoo for $4.8 billion. Can you hear me now, Verizon? Is that still the case? Was the breach disclosed to the Verizon board at the time, or are we all finding out at the same time?
Verizon execs likely are just as shell-shocked as we are. Already on the heels of the earlier disclosed hack in September, Verizon requested a $1 billion discount. Do we expect them to double their request this time around? We might argue that yes, they will. Maybe they’ll make it easy and round it up to a $2 billion sale.
(Funny how ten years ago, Yahoo could’ve almost bought Facebook for $1 billion. With all of Yahoo’s properties to date, this is chump change.)
A severe breach
Barring talks about acquisitions, this is a more concerning breach because not only were passwords stolen, but so were names, phone numbers, and email addresses–plus, perhaps more importantly, unencrypted security questions. Forget your passwords, your security questions will now need to be changed everywhere.
On the plus side, does anyone want a job on the Yahoo security team?
Well, at least they implemented multi-factor authentication now. Even though it took 3 years to tell me my account was breached.
Hi, when I first started with comps a computer filled a room and a hdd was size of a small washing machine, and may have been all of 5Mb things have moved on and university days are way behind us. 8″ floppy disks were the norm then we got 1.44mb floppies, that weren’t floppy but hard plastic shell. Hdd were still enormous and small capacity Mfm Linux was not yet thought up? But we cut our teeth on UNIX Dos and Machine code well for me anyway, graphics were rubbish we had VGA, EVGA, resolution was low things took forever to render, Windows 3.1, win95, 98, 2000, was in vouge, we did amazing things with arcane tools, but we progressed, look what we have now! How things have changed yet stayed the same? My first PC was homemade, an ETI660 from an Australian magazine article, Z80 based programmed in Machine Code, hexadecimal. The days of Sinclair Spectrum, Comodore 64, Apple Mac, then came the IBM clones, pc’s had seperate Math Co-processors, now we have multiple cores in one. Memory was expensive n 1mb was enormous. Who needs more than 64kb anyway? Ah how things have changed, now 8Gb is the norm with terabyte Hdd being common, and small, now we have solid state hdd, nowadays, with most cellphones having more everything than the most powerful PC’s of the time. Computing is almost unrecognisable from the beginning until now. The miniturisation has put enormous computing power in ones hand making the Cellphone an indespensable tool for most. I sure have seen a lot of change since I got my BSc in computing, back in the day, now all that knowledge is redundant to say the least, however the principles remain the same. So I wonder what the next 30 or so years will bring, Alas n alack I fear I will not b here to see it😞 Such is life. It’s been a ride that I’ve managed to stay on, n shall for a while yet. Oops my watch is talking to me gotta go. Peace n love for all Chris Bell.
im not quite sure why you felt the need to post what you did on an article talking about the yahoo breach……it would have been more apt on another article.
I think that this comment may have been meant for the article on cyclical technology. No biggie.
It really is amazing how things have changed over time, and yet remained the same. I have no idea what technology will look like in 30 years, but I did recently write a piece on my technology predictions for the next five years. It should be published on this site relatively soon.