According to reports that surfaced earlier today, Yahoo will soon confirm an enormous data breach of one of its services which allegedly compromised over 200 million users. Multiple sources with an intimate knowledge of the situation are claiming that the tech giant will go public with the information and shed some light on the latest hacking incident its service has suffered by the end of the week. The breach in question reportedly happened at least several months ago but Yahoo’s representatives wouldn’t speak publicly about it so far if there was any sort of government investigation in the matter. Frankly, when one of the largest tech companies on the planet gets hacked so badly that several hundred million users are compromised, one can almost bet that the government got involved.
It’s possible that this incident is related to the last month’s report of a hacker selling 200 million accounts stolen from Yahoo’s servers but no one’s confirming anything yet. Furthermore, the timing of this announcement which is likely coming today or tomorrow probably couldn’t be worse for the company’s shareholders as they’re currently in the process of selling their core business to Verizon for $4.8 billion. Depending on the scale of the breach, it isn’t out of the realm of possibility for that figure to be lowered. On the other hand, it’s also possible that the soon-to-be new owners of Yahoo’s assets forced the sellers to go public with this information so that they can start leading the business with a somewhat clean slate.
If this upcoming announcement does end up being connected to the aforementioned hacking report from August, it could cause a whole lot of problems for the company given how Yahoo hasn’t even confirmed that the hacker’s claim was legitimate. For the uninitiated, the said individual wrote that the accounts they were selling were stolen in a 2012 hacking of the company’s servers and given how the Internet giant never issued a password reset call to its users, it could mean hundreds of millions of people were unknowingly compromised for four years. We’ll hopefully know more in a few hours as it isn’t likely a huge company like Yahoo will make any huge announcements over the weekend.