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In an interesting twist of events, Yahoo has announced that it has discovered that more than 1 billion of the accounts of its clients were hacked back in 2013. This new revelation comes hot on the heels of another announcement by the company that 500 million user accounts were compromised by hackers a few months ago.
Announcing the discovery, Bob Lord, who is the Yahoo’s Chief Information Security Officer, said that the company had just discovered about the new hack after analysing leads provided by security agencies.
String of Controversies
The new revelation comes at a time when Yahoo is battling a crisis following revelations that more than 500 million user accounts had been hacked. Since the revelation of this hack, Yahoo has been at pains to explain how hackers managed to access detailed data of clients. The company has so far failed to provide a plausible explanation of how hackers managed to breach its systems and steal millions of passwords, names and email addresses of its users.
And in a case that is similar to what happened during the previous hack, Yahoo says that it cannot explain how the hackers managed to steal the data of its clients. Besides, the company says that it stores the passwords of its clients in an encrypted form based on the MD5 protocol. However, there have been widespread concerns that this algorithm is not as secure as many people believe it is.
Another issue is that Yahoo executives knew about the previous hack years before but chose to keep quiet. There have been growing concerns by members of the public that the Yahoo executives may have acted in bad faith by choosing not to disclose information about the hack.
It is still unclear whether, in this current revelation, the executives of the company had prior knowledge of the hack but chose to keep quiet. However, the company says that it discovered the hack after security agencies informed it of the possibility that its systems may have been breached.
This new revelation is likely to affect the ongoing takeover of the company by Verizon. A few months ago, Verizon announced that it was buying Yahoo for about $4.8 billion. However, following news about the first hack back in September, Verizon said that it was reviewing its position based on developments at Yahoo. It is likely that Verizon will continue reviewing its position following news of this separate hack.
