Search giant Yahoo is potentially nearing its doomsday if a single more speck of dust in the company’s operations is disclosed. Yesterday, the company disclosed a massive breach of their servers, which happened back in 2013 and led hackers to extract personal information of over a billion users (even larger than the previous 500 million).
But New York Times reports, citing cyber security firm InfoArmor’s CIO Andrew Komarov, mention that the extensive database of user credentials has already been sold on the Dark Web for a whopping $300,000. The sale happened in August last year and is believed to include three buyers, including two known spammers and an entity that appears to be interested in espionage. This Yahoo account database was offered to these hackers groups by an Eastern Europe-based hacking collective to each of the three for the said amount.
Though $300,000 is not the largest sum of money someone might be willing to offer for a database of a billion Yahoo users but the material importance of the same has deepened over time. If the buyers are now looking for buyers for their data then they might be able to get their hands on a rather hefty sum.
Though Yahoo is still unaware of how the hackers were able to access their e-mail servers and take off with personal info, including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, MD5 hashed passwords, under their belts. This breach is also said to include encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers for some of the users. The database is also said to include login credentials of over 150,000 U.S government and military employees — which puts their identity and life at risk.
Due to the potential effects of the said breach, FBI is also doing their part and has started investigating the breach. Yahoo is still working on verifying the claims made by Komarov and plans to disclose the specifics of the breach in the coming weeks. Till then foreign investigators have helped the company discover that their proprietary code is now in the hands of the hackers and the same is being used by them to forge cookies. These cookies can be used to gain access to user accounts without a password and it is probable that the same method was used for the next breach in August 2014.
This revelation for the search giant is proving to be substantial and has caused its share price to tumble by about 6 percent. The investors are now fearing that this spells bad news for the ongoing $4.8 billion acquisition of Yahoo by the telecom giant Verizon. Due to the same, they have started pulling back while earlier they believed that the acquisition was the best news that the company has heard in recent times.
Now, the biggest question that stands between this acquisition is — Will Verizon go ahead with this purchase with a rebate or completely pull out of the said deal? Comment your thoughts down below.
