[received today pertaining to an email account — John R.]

NOTICE OF DATA BREACH

Dear John,

We are writing to inform you about a data security issue that may involve your Yahoo account information.

What Happened?

A copy of certain user account information was stolen from our systems in late 2014 by what we believe is a state-sponsored actor. We are closely coordinating with law enforcement on this matter and working diligently to protect you.

What Information Was Involved?

The stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (the vast majority with bcrypt) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. Not all of these data elements may have been present for your account. The ongoing investigation suggests that stolen information did not include unprotected passwords, payment card data, or bank account information; payment card data and bank account information are not stored in the system that the investigation found to be affected.

What We Are Doing

We are taking action to protect our users:
We are asking potentially affected users to promptly change their passwords and adopt alternate means of account verification.
We invalidated unencrypted security questions and answers so they cannot be used to access an account.
We are recommending that all users who haven’t changed their passwords since 2014 do so.
We continue to enhance our systems that detect and prevent unauthorized access to user accounts.
We are working closely with law enforcement on this matter.

Our investigation into this matter continues.

What You Can Do

We encourage you to follow these security recommendations:
Change your password and security questions for any other accounts on which you used the same or similar information used for your Yahoo account.
Review your accounts for suspicious activity.
Be cautious of any unsolicited communications that ask for your personal information or refer you to a web page asking for personal information.
Avoid clicking on links or downloading attachments from suspicious emails.

Additionally, please consider using Yahoo Account Key, a simple authentication tool that eliminates the need to use a password altogether.

For More Information

For more information about this issue and our security resources, please visit the Yahoo Security Issue FAQs page available at https://yahoo.com/security-update.

Protecting your information is important to us and we work continuously to strengthen our defenses against the threats targeting our industry.

Sincerely,
Bob Lord
Chief Information Security Officer
Yahoo

END

EDITOR: If you have a Yahoo Account and you did not receive a letter or similar as above from Yahoo you are advised to still execute the security recommendations under “What You Can Do”.