A year ago, Yahoo! officials confirmed a cyberattack that compromised the accounts of 500 million users. Three months later, we learned that another attack had occurred before that one, adding 1 billion more affected accounts. Now that Yahoo! is part of Verizon, a deep investigation has revealed that the 1 billion figure was actually 3 billion. In other words, every single Yahoo! account as of August 2013 was affected.
Few falls have been as hard and forceful as Yahoo!'s. Of course, we cannot say the same about its executives, who received a juicy cut of the 4.48 billion dollars that Verizon paid for its digital skeleton (its ex-CEO Marissa Mayer earned more than 230 million dollars in five years of "work"). But the brand's value evaporated into thin air (maybe not in Japan, where it remains very popular), and users did the same, especially after two cyberattacks were confirmed. Verizon took Yahoo!, combined it with AOL, and formed Oath last June, but the telecommunications giant remains in "damage control" mode.
The Real Scope
In a brief official statement published by the US SEC, Verizon indicated that after obtaining "new intelligence" provided by independent forensic experts, it was proven that the accounts affected in August 2013 were not 1 billion as initially believed, but 3 billion, which is equivalent to all accounts at that time. The investigation suggests that in the breach, plain-text passwords, credit cards, or bank credentials were never exposed, and that Yahoo! continues to send notifications to its users, however, it does not qualify as a new security problem.
Maybe it's not so, but knowing that the attack reached ALL Yahoo! users instead of 33 percent does not leave us any calmer. The US Department of Justice announced a series of charges against four men linked to Russian intelligence, although the text mentions the 2014 attack (the one with 500 million). At this point, calendar differences matter little. Yahoo! is a sieve, and when we thought the situation couldn't get worse, we found out about this.
