Hacked Yahoo Data Is for Sale on Dark Web
Hacked Yahoo Data Is for Sale on Dark Web:- Some time around August 2013, hackers penetrated the email system of Yahoo, one of the world’s largest and oldest providers of free email services. The attackers quietly scooped up the records of more than 1 billion users, including names, birth dates, phone numbers and passwords that were encrypted with an easily broken form of security.
The intruders also obtained the security questions and backup email addresses used to reset lost passwords — valuable information for someone trying to break into other accounts owned by the same user, and particularly useful to a hacker seeking to break into government computers around the world: Several million of the backup addresses belonged to military and civilian government employees from dozens of nations, including more than 150,000 Americans.
No one knows what happened to the data during the next three years. But last August, a geographically dispersed hacking collective based in Eastern Europe quietly began offering the whole database for sale, according to Andrew Komarov, chief intelligence officer at InfoArmor, an Arizona cybersecurity firm, who monitors the dark corners of the internet inhabited by criminals, spies and spammers. Three buyers — two known spammers and an entity that appeared more interested in espionage — paid about $300,000 each for a complete copy of the database, he said.
The attack, which Yahoo disclosed on Wednesday, is the largest known data breach of a company. And neither Yahoo nor the public had any idea it had occurred until a month ago, when law enforcement authorities came to the company with samples of the hacked data from an undisclosed source.
Yahoo still does not know who broke into its systems in 2013, how they got in or what they did with the data, the company said Wednesday. It has made more progress tracking down a separate hacking episode in 2014, which compromised 500 million email accounts and was disclosed in September. The company has said it believes the 2014 attack was sponsored by a government entity but has not identified it.
The two huge breaches revealed this fall threaten to erode consumer confidence in the company and are endangering its deal to sell its internet businesses to Verizon Communications for $4.8 billion. On Thursday, Yahoo’s stock plunged 6 percent as investors worried that Verizon would abandon the purchase.
Mr. Komarov said in an interview on Thursday that his company obtained a copy of the database and over the last few months alerted military and law enforcement authorities in the United States, Australia, Canada, Britain and the European Union about the breach. After those parties verified the authenticity of the stolen records, he said, some of them went to Yahoo with their concerns.
InfoArmor did not go to Yahoo directly, Mr. Komarov said, because the internet giant was dismissive of the security firm when approached by an intermediary. He also said he did not trust Yahoo to thoroughly investigate the breach since it could threaten the sale to Verizon.
Source:- http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/technology/hacked-yahoo-data-for-sale-dark-web.html
