Yahoo, which admitted to two separate breaches that saw 500 million users’ and then 1 billion users’ details stolen by hackers – the New York Times reports that a billion-user database was sold on the Dark Web last August for $300,000.
That’s according to Andrew Komarov, chief intelligence office at security firm InfoArmor. He told NYT that three buyers, including two prominent spammers and another who might be involved in espionage tactics purchased the entire database at the aforementioned price from a hacker group believed to based in Eastern Europe.
It’s lovely to know that it only costs $300,000 to be able to threaten a billion people’s online existence – which means each account is only worth $0.0003 to hackers who can ruin your life online in a matter of minutes.
Yahoo also doesn’t yet know who made off with all the data from the attack in 2013, which is said to be the largest breach of any company ever.
In addition to full names, passwords, birth dates and phone numbers, the database also contains security questions and backup email addresses that could help with resetting forgotten passwords.
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