Yahoo confirms that 500 million user accounts have been stolen

[HEXUS]

The company says that it believes a "state-sponsored actor" was behind the data breach.

Read more.

[aidanjt]

So 499 million accounts that have been abandoned for years?

[ik9000]

Potentially affected users, including myself, received emails in the last few hours which contained security recommendations.

Does that mean if people didn't get an email their account hasn't been affected?

Also if this was in 2014 why are we only hearing about it now?

[ChewieJ]

That might explain the sudden explosion in spam and failed to send notifications I am seeing on my old account that i now rarely use.
all the spam has virgilio.it and freemail.hu.

Guess i'd better get that one closed down for good then.

[ksdp37]

"Verizon, the UK telecoms giant"

Since when?

[excalibur1814]

Probably sold them all.

[badass]

If Yahoo are telling the truth and are correct, they never stood a chance. Nor does anyone else against state sponsored actors where the state doing the sponsoring is well resourced. e.g. US, Russia and China mainly. It is a battle of resources between the company and the state and the state always has more.

The state sponsored actors have as many attempts as they like to get in with no downside to being blocked.
The target only has to miss one attack.

[Jonj1611]

Any recommend an alternative to Yahoo? Not google.

[Output]

Any recommend an alternative to Yahoo? Not google.

Not a recommendation as I haven't tried it, but isn't ProtonMail supposed to be the latest noteworthy email service?

[Johna]

Does that mean if people didn't get an email their account hasn't been affected?

Also if this was in 2014 why are we only hearing about it now?

It's not only yahoo, I think I've seen other major players being hit but us normal people get the news way after it's all done with...

[Jonj1611]

Not a recommendation as I haven't tried it, but isn't ProtonMail supposed to be the latest noteworthy email service?

I took a look at that and it seemed ok, but sending limits on emails :/

[Jonj1611]

Not sure if its co-incidence but since this story got out my yahoo email addresses are being hammered with spam.

[Top_gun]

I have a rarely used yahoo account which I mainly use for making enquiries to businesses so that my other main accounts are not clogged up with their marketing emails.

Like others, my yahoo account is clogged up with spam. As for security, I've used an alias name and date of birth when I first set up the account 16 years ago so I'm not too concern with security and there shouldn't be any sensitive emails either.

I think the real issue here, as another person have mentioned, why Yahoo did not alert their customers over the stolen passwords.

[ik9000]

and more bad news for Yahoo mail users, they've apparently been scanning all your email. Though TBH I kind of assumed that a free email might well be doing that anyway.

[Jonj1611]

Quite a few companies are apparently. I am currently moving everything to a new provider.