A Hack to Yahoo’s Shrunken Reputation

In early August, Vice’s Motherboard site reported that a notorious cybercriminal named Peace had been trying to sell the personal information of hundreds of millions of Yahoo users on the Dark Web. The report came at a painfully awkward time for Yahoo. The company, founded in 1995, had struggled for years to compete against younger, faster-moving Internet companies, and under its latest C.E.O., Marissa Mayer, it had ultimately failed. Just a couple of days before the Motherboard article was published, Verizon had announced that it would acquire Yahoo for nearly five billion dollars—a decent outcome, given the circumstances—but it would be months before the deal closed. Yahoo had already opened an internal investigation into the reported cyber crime. In the end, it found no evidence that Peace was really selling Yahoo users’ information. But the experience, according to a person close to Yahoo, helped spur the company to investigate its records to get a better grasp, in general, of security issues.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

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