Yahoo Hack: One Billion Accounts Compromised!

Yahoo announced last Wednesday that the latest hacking attack on the troubled Internet services pioneer has affected more than 1 billion user accounts which is double the number affected by a hack on its  in September.

The stolen data included users' names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords and also included some security questions and answers, some of which weren't encrypted.

"Yahoo is notifying potentially affected users and has taken steps to secure their accounts, including requiring users to change their passwords," the company said in a statement. "Yahoo has also invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so that they cannot be used to access an account."

It may be noted that Yahoo has been trying to sell itself to Verizon and the deal is set to close in the first quarter of next year. The personal information hackers stole could be used in combination with other hacked data, for instance if a criminal has a credit card number he could match the security answer with the stolen data.