yahoo data breach | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

Karim Baratov , a 22-year-old Kazakhstan-born Canadian citizen, has pleaded guilty to hacking charges over his involvement in massive 2014 Yahoo data breach that affected all three billion yahoo accounts . In March, the US Justice Department announced charges against two Russian intelligence officers (Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin) from Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) and two hackers (Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov) for breaking into yahoo servers in 2014. While Karim Baratov (Kay, a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov) was arrested in Toronto at his Ancaster home by the Toronto Police Department in March this year, Alexsey Belan and both FSB officers currently reside in Russia, unlikely to be extradited. In the federal district court in San Francisco on Tuesday, Baratov admitted to helping the Russian spies and pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts which includes: One count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act by...

The largest known hack of user data in the history just got tripled in size. Yahoo, the internet company that's acquired by Verizon this year, now believes the total number of accounts compromised in the August 2013 data breach, which was disclosed in December last year, was not 1 billion—it's 3 Billion . Yes, the record-breaking Yahoo data breach affected every user on its service at the time. Late last year, Yahoo revealed the company had suffered a massive data breach in August 2013, which affected 1 billion user accounts . The 2013 hack exposed user account information, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of births, hashed passwords (using MD5), and, in some cases, "encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers," Yahoo said in 2016. At that time, Yahoo did confirm that hackers did not obtain bank account details or credit card information tied to the Yahoo accounts. The data breach was attributed to state-sponsored ...

Vulnerability Management (VM) has long been a cornerstone of organizational cybersecurity. Nearly as old as the discipline of cybersecurity itself, it aims to help organizations identify and address potential security issues before they become serious problems. Yet, in recent years, the limitations of this approach have become increasingly evident.  At its core, Vulnerability Management processes remain essential for identifying and addressing weaknesses. But as time marches on and attack avenues evolve, this approach is beginning to show its age. In a recent report, How to Grow Vulnerability Management into Exposure Management (Gartner, How to Grow Vulnerability Management Into Exposure Management, 8 November 2024, Mitchell Schneider Et Al.), we believe Gartner® addresses this point precisely and demonstrates how organizations can – and must – shift from a vulnerability-centric strategy to a broader Exposure Management (EM) framework. We feel it's more than a worthwhile read an...

In the digital world, it just takes one click to get the keys to the kingdom. Do you know spear-phishing was the only secret weapon behind the biggest data breach in the history? It's true, as one of the Yahoo employees fell victim to a simple phishing attack and clicked one wrong link that let the hackers gain a foothold in the company's internal networks. You may be familiar with phishing attacks — an attempt to steal user credentials or financial data — while, Spear-phishing is a targeted form of phishing in which attackers trick employees or vendors into providing remote-access credentials or opening a malicious attachment containing an exploit or payload. Here's how the Yahoo's massive data breach was traced back to human error and who were the alleged masterminds behind this hack. On Wednesday, the US government charged two Russian spies (Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin) and two criminal hackers (Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov) in connection with the 20...

The 2014 Yahoo hack disclosed late last year that compromised over 500 million Yahoo user accounts was believed to be carried out by a state-sponsored hacking group. Now, two Russian intelligence officers and two criminal hackers have been charged by the US government in connection with the 2014 Yahoo hack that compromised about 500 million Yahoo user accounts, the Department of Justice announced Wednesday. According to the prosecutors, at least 30 million accounts were accessed as part of a spam campaign to access the email contents of thousands of people, including journalists, government officials, and technology company employees. The four defendants — Two officers from the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and two other hackers — are identified as: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33 — an officer in the FSB Center for Information Security at the time of the hack, and now Russian national and resident. Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43 — an FSB officer, a superior...

Has Yahoo rebuilt your trust again? If yes, then you need to think once again, as the company is warning its users of another hack. Last year, Yahoo admitted two of the largest data breaches on record. One of which that took place in 2013 disclosed personal details associated with more than 1 Billion Yahoo user accounts . Well, it's happened yet again. Yahoo sent out another round of notifications to its users on Wednesday, warning that their accounts may have been compromised as recently as last year after an ongoing investigation turned up evidence that hackers used forged cookies to log accounts without passwords. The company quietly revealed the data breach in security update in December 2016, but the news was largely overlooked, as the statement from Yahoo provided information on a separate data breach that occurred in August 2013 involving more than 1 billion accounts. The warning message sent Wednesday to some Yahoo users read: "Based on the ongoing i...

Recently Yahoo disclosed a three-year-old massive data breach in its company that exposed personal details associated with more than 1 Billion user accounts , which is said to be the largest data breach of any company ever. The new development in Yahoo!'s 2013 data breach is that the hacker sold its over Billion-user database on the Dark Web last August for $300,000, according to Andrew Komarov, Chief Intelligence Officer (CIO) at security firm InfoArmor. Komarov told the New York Times that three different buyers, including two "prominent spammers" and the third, is believed to be involved in espionage tactics paid $300,000 to gain control of the entire database. The hacker group that breached Yahoo and sold the database is believed to based in Eastern Europe, but the company still does not know if this information is accurate or not. Beside full names, passwords, date of births and phone numbers of 1 Million Yahoo users, the database also includes backup em...

In what believe to be the largest data breach in history, Yahoo is reporting a massive data breach that disclosed personal details associated with more than 1 Billion user accounts in August 2013. …And it's separate from the one disclosed by Yahoo! in September, in which hackers compromised as many as 500 Million user accounts in late 2014. What's troubling is that the company has not been able to discovered how "an unauthorized third party" were able to steal the data associated with more than one Billion users. The data breach officially disclosed on Wednesday actually occurred in 2013 and, just like the one in 2014, allowed the cyber crooks to obtain personal information of its users but not credit card details. Here's what Yahoo's chief information security officer Bob Lord says the hackers obtained: "The stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using...

Yahoo! has disabled automatic email forwarding -- a feature that lets its users forward a copy of incoming emails from one account to another. The company has faced lots of bad news regarding its email service in past few weeks. Last month, the company admitted a massive 2014 data breach that exposed account details of over 500 Million Yahoo users. If this wasn't enough for users to quit the service, another shocking revelation came last week that the company scanned the emails of hundreds of millions of its users at the request of a U.S. intelligence service last year. That's enough for making a loyal Yahoo Mail user to switch for other rival alternatives, like Google Gmail, or Microsoft's Outlook. Yahoo Mail Disables Auto-Forwarding; Making It Hard to Leave But as Yahoo Mail users are trying to leave the email service, the company is making it more difficult for them to transition to another email service. That's because since the beginning of Octob...

Today Yahoo! is all over the Internet, but in a way the company would never have expected. It all started days ago when Reuters cited some anonymous sources and reported that Yahoo built a secret software to scan the emails of hundreds of millions of its users at the request of a U.S. intelligence service. At this point, we were not much clear about the intelligence agency: the National Security Agency or the FBI? The news outlet then reported that the company installed the software at the behest of Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court order. Following the report, the New York Times reported that Yahoo used its system developed to scan for child p*rnography and spam to search for emails containing an undisclosed digital "signature" of a certain method of communication employed by a state-sponsored terrorist organization. Although Yahoo denied the reports, saying they are "misleading," a series of anonymous sources, therefore, unaccounta...

It seems like it is not all over for Yahoo yet. Another day, another bad news for Yahoo! Verizon, which has agreed to purchase  Yahoo for $4.8 Billion , is now asking for a $1 Billion discount, according to recent reports. The request comes after Verizon Communications learned about the recent disclosures about hacking  and spying in past few weeks. Just two weeks ago, Yahoo revealed that at least a half Billion Yahoo accounts were stolen in 2014 hack, marking it as the biggest data breach in history. And if this wasn't enough, the company faced allegations earlier this week that it built a secret tool to scan all of its users' emails last year at the behest of a United States intelligence agency. Due to these incidents, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, who runs the Verizon subsidiary, is "pretty upset" about Yahoo's lack of disclosure, and is even seeking to pull out of the deal completely or cut the price, the New York Post claimed, citing multiple sources. ...

The massive data breach that Yahoo! confirmed to the world last week is claimed by the company to have been carried out by a "state-sponsored actor" in 2014, which exposed the accounts of at least 500 Million Yahoo users . But, now it seems that Yahoo has downplayed a mega data breach and trying to hide it's own security blunder. Recently the information security firm InfoArmor that analyzed the data breach refuted the Yahoo's claim, stating that the data breach was the work of seasoned cyber criminals who later sold the compromised Yahoo accounts to an Eastern European nation-state. Over 1 Billion Accounts May Have Been Hacked Now, there's one more twist in the unprecedented data heist. A recent advancement in the report indicates that the number of affected Yahoo accounts may be between 1 Billion and 3 Billion. An unnamed, former Yahoo executive who is familiar with the company's security says that the Yahoo's back-end system's arch...

500 million accounts — that's half a Billion users! That's how many Yahoo accounts were compromised in a massive data breach dating back to 2014 by what was believed to be a "state sponsored" hacking group. Over a month ago, a hacker was found to be selling login information related to 200 million Yahoo accounts on the Dark Web , although Yahoo acknowledged that the breach was much worse than initially expected. "A recent investigation by Yahoo! Inc. has confirmed that a copy of certain user account information was stolen from the company's network in late 2014 by what it believes is a state-sponsored actor," reads the statement . Yahoo is investigating the breach with law enforcement agency and currently believes that users' names, email addresses, dates of birth, phone numbers, passwords, and in some cases, encrypted and unencrypted security questions-answers were stolen from millions of Yahoo users. However, the company does not believe ...