As one of the largest gatherings of cybersecurity professionals kicks off in Las Vegas this week, there is yet another possibly massive data breach that will surely be discussed by attendees. Black Hat 2016 is buzzing with talk of the latest Democratic National Committee breaches, but now also with concerns about a possible Yahoo breach as well.
Reportedly, the hacker who is likely responsible for “mega-breaches” at MySpace and LinkedIn has now claimed to have posted information from 200 million Yahoo accounts for sale on the Dark Web.
The Sunnyvale-based multinational company said it was taking the claim “very seriously” and that an investigation is ongoing.
“Yahoo works hard to keep our users safe, and we always encourage our users to create strong passwords, or give up passwords altogether by using Yahoo Account Key, and use different passwords for different platforms,” the company said in a statement.
The major part of the investigation, of course, is determining whether the claim of the breach is in fact true. Motherboard, which initially released news of the alleged brief, reportedly obtained a small sample of the data – birthdates, passwords, usernames – offered for sale in order to test the authenticity of the accounts. Approximately 2 dozen of the usernames tested reportedly belonged to legitimate accounts.
Possibly the data is old, however, because attempts by Motherboard to access other accounts with the data failed, sending a message that the account was disabled or discontinued.
As the investigation continues, account holders wait to discover the truth of the matter, whether the alleged perpetrator of the hack, “Peace,” has violated the integrity of the accounts. Comodo offers a variety of solutions to offer peace of mind to enterprises small, medium and large, as well as private users. Join The Fight against malware.
