Yahoo announced last week that a massive data breach had taken place in 2014 when at least 500 million Yahoo accounts were stolen from the company. This interesting news came to us from the USA Today in their article, “Yahoo could pay for breach negligence in lower-priced Verizon deal.”
The breach, which may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers, is one of the largest such thefts of its kind.
The biggest concern is that it took them so long to realize it had happened. This came at an inopportune time as Yahoo was negotiating a deal with Verizon and this gives them more leverage to lower the $4.8 billion originally agreed upon in July, or even derail the deal. Verizon beat out multiple bidders for the Yahoo assets that include Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Sports, Tumblr and Flickr. Verizon is reporting that they learned about the breach only two days before Yahoo’s public disclosure.
Melody K. Smith
Sponsored by Access Innovations, the world leader in thesaurus, ontology, and taxonomy creation and metadata application.
