Friday, December 16, 2016

OWL Cybersecurity: Yahoo User Records Were Already On Sale On Wednesday

Denver-based OWL Cybersecurity, which monitors the nefarious buying and selling of stolen user data on the "darknet", said that it already has been seeing data from those 1 billion stolen Yahoo accounts being brokered on the darknet. OWL said that as many as 200 million of those 1 billion records reported stolen by Yahoo on Thursday--which include usernames, hashed passwords, security questions, and more--were available as early as December 14th. OWL Cybersecurity, led by Mark Turnage, has developed a system which automates the culling of what data is being brokered on the darknet to help companies better figure out who, or what, has been stolen from their systems. Yahoo said on Thursday that it had discovered that 1 billion records from its users had been hacked in August of 2013, separate from another devastating hack it reported in September. Yahoo also said it had figured out and fixed another vulnerability in its system, which allows hackers to spoof cookies from the site--and gain access to user accounts, without even needing a password.