Seems Yahoo could by lying about who actually did the hack and this may be due to the merger between Verizon and Yahoo.

The Yahoo hackers weren’t state-sponsored, a security firm says

CSO: Common criminals, not state-sponsored hackers, carried out the massive 2014 data breach that exposed information about millions of Yahoo user accounts, a security firm said Wednesday.

Yahoo has blamed state actors for the attack, but it was actually elite hackers-for-hire who did it, according to InfoArmor, which claims to have some of the stolen information.

The independent security firm found the alleged data as part of its investigation into “Group E,” a team of five professional hackers believed to be from Eastern Europe.

InfoArmor’s claims dispute Yahoo’s contention that a “state-sponsored actor” was behind the data breach, in which information from 500 million user accounts was stolen. Some security experts have been skeptical of Yahoo’s claim and wonder why the company isn’t offering more details.

InfoArmor also claimed that Group E was behind high-profile breaches at LinkedIn, Dropbox and Tumblr. To sell that information, the team has used other hackers, such as Tessa88 and peace_of_mind, to offer the stolen goods on the digital black market.

“The group is really unique,” Komarov said. “They’re responsible for the largest hacks in history, in term of users affected.” More details here.

**** Advice****

You don’t care who has looked at your emails? Really? Consider:

Here’s a simple exercise I invite you to do. Open your email and take a look at everything that you keep on it, both sent and received conversations. Scan all of them, every attachment you ever sent or received, every personal and work conversation, every email draft.

The truth is, we aren’t aware that we are living a big part of our lives through our email inbox.

We keep it all there, in only one place: photos, contracts, invoices, tax forms, reset passwords for every other account, sometimes even passwords or credit card PINs.

And our emails are interconnected to all our other digital accounts, from bank accounts to social networks (LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, etc), cloud services (Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox), online shops (Amazon, for, ex, where you most likely saved your credit card details as well) and so on.

By simply breaching the email, a malicious hacker can easily get access to all those. They know how to do that.  Read More here…you REALLY need to.

From Digital Guardian:

Wrapping your head around the idea of a breach that affects half a billion users is a difficult task, and it’s not one that anyone has had to contemplate until now. Yahoo’s data breach is far and away the largest on record in terms of the number of users involved. The economic effect on the company will take years to calculate, and it may never be fully known, as is often the case with these breaches. Though Yahoo, already on the ropes and in the middle of a sale to Verizon, may see some rather unpleasant effects quite soon.

From the user’s perspective, too, the massive amount of data taken in the compromise – including dates of birth, email addresses, physical addresses, and security questions and answers – could have far-reaching effects. The information is an identity thief’s starter kit, even without bank account or payment card data. Yahoo has pointed the finger at a state-sponsored attacker, as is customary in these incidents.

“Based on the ongoing investigation, Yahoo believes that information associated with at least 500 million user accounts was stolen and the investigation has found no evidence that the state-sponsored actor is currently in Yahoo’s network. Yahoo is working closely with law enforcement on this matter,” the company said in a statement on the compromise.

As gory as they are, the public details of the Yahoo compromise aren’t what’s really interesting or important here. The intriguing part in this case is how long it took Yahoo to uncover and disclose the data breach. In its public statements, the company said it discovered the compromise recently, but the data was stolen in 2014. That fact has drawn the attention of Capitol Hill and a group of senators is asking some very uncomfortable questions of Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer.

In their letter, Sens. Ed Markey, Patrick Leahy, Elizabeth Warren, Al Franken, Richard Blumenthal and Ron Wyden asked Mayer when and how Yahoo learned of the breach, why the company took so long to uncover it, and whether any government agencies warned Yahoo of an attack by state-sponsored attackers. The lawmakers also said that the data taken from Yahoo could be used easily in other attacks.

“The stolen data included usernames, passwords, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and security questions and answers,” the senators said. “This is highly sensitive, personal information that hackers can use not only to access Yahoo customer accounts, but also potentially to gain access to any other account or service that users access with similar login or personal information, including bank information and social media profiles.” Complete summary here.