‘A forged cookie may have been used … to access your account’
Yahoo has begun warning individual users that their accounts with the service may have been compromised in a massive data breach it reported late last year.
The warning, in email messages sent from Yahoo CISO Bob Lord, tell users that a forged cookie may have been used to access their accounts in previous years.
The warning to Yahoo users come at the same time that news reports suggest that Verizon Communications, in negotiations to buy Yahoo, may be seeking a discount of $250 million because of the data breaches.
In December, Yahoo reported that data associated with more than 1 billion user accounts was stolen in August 2013. Less than three months earlier, the company reported a separate data breach affecting more than 500 million users that originally occurred in late 2014.
In a new warning to users sent Wednesday, Yahoo said the forged cookie problem allowed hackers to gain access to user accounts without passwords. The company connected the issue to the breach it reported in September.
