Yahoo breached by cyber-criminals and not ‘state-sponsored actors’

Yahoo has had its share of criticism for negligence on its part over massive data breach in 2014 that has left over 500 million user accounts vulnerable. But it’s far from over for the turbulent ship. The company is now being rebuked by cyber security experts who believe that the servers were actually breached by notable cyber criminals and not some ‘state-sponsored actors’.

Last week, Yahoo publicly acknowledged that the account information of at least 500 million users was stolen by hackers in 2014, in the biggest known cyber breach of one company’s computer network. The Internet company blamed “state-sponsored actors” for the theft that includes names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, security questions.

However, Cybersecurity firm InfoArmor, who has access to a portion of the leaked database, says that the case is not how Yahoo seems to be presenting it. “We don’t see any reason to say that it’s state sponsored.

Their clients are state sponsored, but not the actual hackers,” says Andrew Komarov, chief intelligence officer of InfoArmor Inc.

According to their report, Yahoo servers were breached by a bunch of hackers, whom it calls ‘Group E’. After going through the stolen data they believe that the actual number of Yahoo accounts affected could be over a billion users, double of what Yahoo has announced. This data dump is, however, expected to include a large number of dormant and bot accounts which are useless to cyber criminals.

“The actual Yahoo data dump is still not available on any underground forums or marketplaces, and has been distributed from so-called Group “E” to one of their proxies for further monetization based on the sale of particular records from the dump, which can be delivered based on the specific criteria of the buyer (login, recovery e-mail, geography, etc.),” reads the official blog post.

The hack was conducted in segments, as the database dump is divided into over a hundred equal parts. It has also been delivered via different files that are organized alphabetically by the name of user accounts. The hacker group has already sold the entire database of leaked accounts at least three times, with at least one of them being a state-sponsored party who had an interest in the exclusive acquisition.

As it's clear from these findings, Yahoo is still not out of its rough sail. Only time will tell how will this report affect its acquisition deal with Verizon Communications Inc. for $4.8 billion.