The IT Nerd

It is clear that Yahoo can’t keep its infrastructure secure as the company has had to admit that they’ve been hacked once again. The Hacker News has details on the hack which apparently doesn’t require require your password for hackers to pwn you. What’s even worse, the report says that “state sponsored attackers” are behind this. Affected users are being notified by Yahoo and there is no clear indication of how many users have been pwned.

Thus it’s no shock that Verizon who still wants to buy Yahoo despite all of this, wants a $250 million haircut to close the deal.  Personally if I were Verizon, I’d scrap the deal entirely. There’s nothing of value here given that Yahoo is a complete disaster from everything that I see here.

In the meantime, I will be visiting a client who apparently can’t get into her Yahoo e-mail in the last few days. I am hoping that this is not related to this hack. But anything is possible. Update to come.

UPDATE: The customer was one of the people affected by this. She had Yahoo force a password change which locked her account until she made the change. I helped her do that on her computer and iPad and now she’s back in business.

It seems that Yahoo is under investigation by the Security & Exchange Comission because of the fact they may not have disclosed the facts behind two epic hacks. Reuters has the details:

Yahoo said in a November 2016 quarterly filing that it was “cooperating with federal, state and foreign” agencies, including the SEC, that were seeking information and documents about a “security incident and related matters.”

The SEC is investigating whether two massive data breaches at Yahoo should have been reported sooner to investors, the Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing people familiar with the matter.

An SEC spokesman declined to comment. A Yahoo spokesman directed Reuters to the company’s November filing.

Seeing as Yahoo has just been bought by Verizon, they may be having buyers remose ase the SEC tends to swing a pretty big hammer when it comes to this sort of thing. It will be interesting to see how painful the SEC makes it for them.

It’s happened again to Yahoo. Over ONE BILLION accounts have been reported as being hacked. Here’s what CNET is saying:

The stolen data included users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and encrypted passwords. Those passwords are scrambled up with an encryption tool called MD5, which experts say is possible to crack with some patience. The data 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.”

The hack revealed Wednesday occurred in August of 2013.

This is after Yahoo disclosed that they were hacked to the tune of half a billion accounts last year.

All together now. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?

If that’s not shocking enough, Verizon is still talking about buying Yahoo, a process that they started last year. Though Verizon did give the deal a billion dollar haircut. The fact that Verizon could continue to talk of a deal after the last Yahoo breach is amazing. If Verizon continues with an additional billion accounts being hacked, it shows that neither the market nor the establishment can penalize egregious data loss. 

Expect Yahoo to get some scrutiny from congress again.

In the aftermath of disclosure of a mega-breach at Yahoo which affects over 500 million users, Verizon may be looking at a way out of Yahoo’s $4.83 billion acquisition deal:

Verizon’s general counsel Craig Silliman told reporters the data breach could trigger a clause in the deal that would allow the U.S. wireless service company to not complete it.

“I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that the impact is material and we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact. If they believe that it’s not then they’ll need to show us that,” he said, declining to comment on whether talks are under way to renegotiate the purchase price.

Clearly you have to believe that this deal is in deep trouble. VERY deep trouble. Do not be shocked if this you start to hear more about this in the coming days and weeks in a negative way if you’re cheering for Yahoo to be sold.

I am sure that there is more to come on this front.

It’s now been a whole day since the news about Yahoo scanning any and every e-mail in their system on behalf of US Intelligence interests came out.Up until now, there’s been little to no comment from Yahoo. That is, until The Intercept reached out to Yahoo and got this back from a PR agency that apparently is representing them:

Good morning –

We are reaching out on behalf of Yahoo regarding yesterday’s Reutersarticle. Yahoo said in a statement:

“The article is misleading. We narrowly interpret every government request for user data to minimize disclosure. The mail scanning described in the article does not exist on our systems.”

Best,

The Joele Frank Team

That’s it. And it opens up a ton of questions in my mind. They say that the mail scanning system “does not exist on our systems.” Does that mean it did exist? And why did this statement come out from a PR company and not from Yahoo? It sounds like they are circling the wagons on this one as this is a PR disaster for Yahoo at a time when they can’t really afford a PR disaster.

Stay tuned to this story. Methinks that it is about to get really interesting.

It seems that lawsuits are the least of Yahoo’s problems when it comes to that epic hack involving 500 million users. It now seems that the US Senate is getting involved:

BREAKING: Six Democratic senators write to @Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer seeking more info on hack investigation, call 2-year lag "unacceptable" pic.twitter.com/7dn7mS5b5U

— Dustin Volz (@dnvolz) September 27, 2016

I can see where this is going. Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is likely going to get called onto the carpet in Washington to explain this on live TV. Given that this is an election year, this will be an epic beat down as Senators who are up for re-election will want to put on a good show. Which means that this will not end well for her.

Sucks to be you Marissa.

After news surfaced that hackers had hit Yahoo hard enough that they got away with the data on 500 million users, you knew that it was only a matter of time before the lawsuits would get filed. Sure enough, the first one has been filed. Two Yahoo users in San Diego, California, filed on Friday a class-action claim [Warning:PDF] against the troubled web biz: Yahoo is accused of failing to take due care of sensitive information under the Unfair Competition Act and the state’s Consumer Legal Remedies Act, plus negligence for its poor security, and breaking the Federal Stored Communications Act. Seeing as America is the land of the lawsuit, this will not be the last one filed, and I fully expect that these lawsuits will have a material impact on Yahoo’s ability to sell itself to Verizon.

This will be worth watching.