Former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has admitted that the web giant still doesn’t know the cause behind the biggest data breach of all time.
It has been four years since the internet’s biggest data breach, that of 3 billion Yahoo user accounts. In a testimony on Wednesday before the Senate Commerce Committee, former Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer admitted that details of the attack remain unknown, to this day.
She stated:
To this day, we have not been able to identify the intrusion that led to this theft. We don’t exactly understand how the act was perpetrated. That certainly led to some of the areas where we had gaps of information.
The comprehensive hack meant all of Yahoo’s users, as of 2013, were compromised by the hack, a fact that the company learned only in December 2016. Stolen account information included users’ names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and even, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.
Mayer placed the blame on Russian hackers, rather than Yahoo’s own lackluster security measures, stating “there was little anyone could do about a state-sponsored attack.”
“As you know, Yahoo was the victim of criminal, state-sponsored attacks on its systems, resulting in the theft of certain user information,” Mayer stated before the Senate Committee hearing. “As CEO, these thefts occurred during my tenure, and I want to sincerely apologize to each and every one of our users.”
She added:
Unfortunately, while all our measures helped Yahoo successfully defend against the barrage of attacks by both private and state-sponsored hackers, Russian agents intruded on our systems and stole our users’ data.
Other witnesses participating in the hearing included interim Equifax CEO Paulino do Rego Barros Jr., as well as former Equifax CEO Richard Smith. Credit reporting giant Equifax is reeling from its own data breach that was first revealed in September this year, leading to the theft of personal information of nearly 150 million consumers.
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