According to NBC News, as many as 200 million Yahoo! accounts may have had their login details stolen by a hacker named Peace. Peace is said to have a record of similar behaviour with MySpace and LinkedIn accounts and has told another news site that Yahoo! is aware of the current hack and that he’s been selling the email addresses privately for a while but has now decided to sell publicly. The said Yahoo email data he put up for sale are “most likely from 2012” and include usernames, hashed passwords, dates of birth and recovery emails. More frightening is the fact that this data is being advertised openly on the dark web (internet black market).
The guys at Yahoo! have not confirmed or denied an actual breach but say they are “working to determine the facts”. In a statement, the company said “we are aware of a claim. We are committed to protecting the security of our users’ information and we take any such claim very seriously.”
Remember Yahoo was bought over by AOL last month for about 5billion dollars after a most unsuccessful comeback as No.1 internet search engine for years on end.