Yahoo has announced details of a massive data breach, in which "information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen".

The company said today that the data was stolen from its network in late 2014, and blamed the action on an unnamed "state-sponsored actor". It said in a press release that it had confirmed the circumstances of the breach as part of "a recent investigation", but it's unclear why it took the company two years to ascertain and disclose full details of the incident.

Yahoo said that its investigation is "ongoing", but so far, it believes that the stolen data "did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information", which are stored on a separate system that was apparently unaffected by the breach.

However, a considerable amount of personal data related to half a billion Yahoo users was compromised, including:

Names
Email addresses
Telephone numbers
Dates of birth
Hashed passwords ("the vast majority with bcrypt")
Encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers

Posted: Sep 22, 2016 3:27 pm
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Source: http://www.neowin.net/news/yahoo-reveals-massive-data-breach-of-over-500-million-accounts-by-state-sponsored-actor