Possibly the biggest data breach ever. Yahoo! is hacked, Verizon goes cold

Possibly the biggest data breach ever. Yahoo! is hacked, Verizon goes cold
Whilst Yahoo! isn’t as big as it once was, there’s a lot of Yahoo! Mail users out there and, worse still, this is a data breach which dates back to 2014. Details of 500 million users are now in the wild, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth and completely unencrypted security questions with the relevant answers. All tasty details for anyone wanting to get your identity.

Credit card details didn’t get lifted, but Verizon appears to have taken a very cool stance to the news. They’re in the middle of buying Yahoo! for £3.7bn. A statement to the BBC states that they themselves only had “limited information” and were unaware of the breach until very recently too..

We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities.

CEO Marissa Mayer stands to collect $44 million if she’s let go within the first year of the deal, but…. will that deal be finalised?

Although news of the hack was already known, the company is only now revealing just how much larger actually is. Seemingly hiding the fact that it knew the data breach was orders of magnitude larger than it admitted is…. well, pretty terrible.