There have been many cyber scandals in the past. Although there are many ways to avoid these problems, hackers continue to become smarter and smarter when learning new techniques for hacking. Data breach is “an incident where information is stolen or taken from a system without the knowledge or authorization of the system’s owner.”
Yahoo had an experience with this online data breach that occurred from 2013 until 2016. There had been times in the past that hackers got into Yahoo’s database but didn’t steal any information, until 2013. This time, after hacking into their system, they took data from all Yahoo accounts which, at the time, was 3 billion. There are many users that have multiple accounts, so less than 3 billion users were affected. The hackers had access to people’s email accounts which included their security questions. Another attack occurred in 2014 that exposed even more information which affected about 500 million people. This time hackers were able to break into Yahoo’s system and access personal account information such as “people’s names, email addresses, passwords, phone numbers and birthdays.” The hackers were able to gain access to this data mainly through phishing emails that were sent to users. By clicking on the links in these emails, hackers were given access to this private information. Yahoo’s response to the first attack in 2013 didn’t fix many of the problems. They had all users change their passwords which was only a temporary fix. After the attack in 2014, more efforts were needed from Yahoo to improve their cyber security. The first thing they planned to do was better protect security questions and answers. They also planned to improve the systems that detect and prevent unauthorized access to their accounts. Lastly, they had every user change their password.
After the 2014 attack these problems continued until 2016 when Yahoo began working with law enforcements to investigate the data breach. Because they weren’t able to stop the hackers in 2014, Yahoo received a $35 million fine. Now a part of Verizon, they promised to spend $306 million between 2019 and 2022 to improve their cyber security.
There are a few things people can learn from this incident. The first being how important it is to regularly change your password. By doing so, you can prevent your private information from being stolen. Another important thing to be aware of is phishing emails. It’s necessary to analyze any email that comes from an unknown recipient or that may seem suspicious. Taking time to make sure an email is legitimate can prevent malware from being downloaded to your computer. This is why it’s so important to not just click on random links or attachments that are sent to your email.
Sources:
https://www.trendmicro.com/vinfo/us/security/definition/data-breach