The Largest Hack Ever? Yahoo Admits 2013 Data Breach Impacted All 3 Billion Accounts

Is it too late for Verizon to get some more of its money back?

After the entity responsible for selling Yahoo agreed to cut $350 million off the company’s sales price earlier this year following revelations that hackers had stolen sensitive  account information of as many as 1.5 billion user accounts during two separate data breaches, the Wall Street Journal is now reporting that the scale of one of those intrusions was much larger than initially believed.

A 2013 data breach that was initially believed to have impacted 1 billion, actually impacted all of Yahoo"s 3 billion user accounts, Verizon announced on Tuesday. Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo formally closed in June after contentious negotiations that were complicated by the discovery of the hacks. The smaller of the two incidents, which took place in 2014, was first disclosed to the public last September. It reportedly involved 500 million user accounts. Three months later, in December, the company publicized the 2013 hack.

The stolen data included names, email addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers and encrypted passwords, Yahoo has said. In October, before the second breach was even disclosed, Verizon signaled that it would likely consider the data breach to be a “material event”, allowing it to change the terms of its deal to buy Yahoo, which it did in February.

As WSJ pointed out, the disclosure shows that executives are still coming to grips with Yahoo"s myriad security problems.

Even before the number of affected user accounts was revised higher to 3 billion, the breach was still the largest on record by number affected. However, most experts consider the Equifax breach, which involved sensitive financial and personal information like credit card, social security and drivers’ license numbers, more damaging than the Yahoo breach.

A spokesman for Oath, the new name of Verizon’s Yahoo unit, said the company determined last week that the break-in was much worse than thought, after it received new information from outside the company. He declined to elaborate on the source of that information. Compromised customer information included usernames, passwords, and in some cases telephone numbers and dates of birth, the spokesman said.

Fortunately for Yahoo executives, as part of the revised deal, Verizon agreed to forfeit the right to sue Yahoo for allegedly covering up the hacks. Meanwhile, the entity selling Yahoo has retained liability for an SEC investigation that was launched in January, as well as any shareholder lawsuits related to the deal itself.
 

Elon Musk Isn't Alone: Vladimir Putin Asks "How Long Before The Robots Eat Us"

Elon Musk isn’t the only one whose afraid that advances in artificial intelligence will leads to something akin to the creation of Skynet.

The Daily Mail is reporting that Russian President Vladimir Putin has expressed reservations about artificial intelligence, even asking the head of Russia"s largest tech firm "how long do we have before the robots eat us"?

The Russian president was speaking to Arkady Volozh, chief of internet firm Yandex, during a tour of the company"s Moscow headquarters, the Daily Mail reports. Volozh was discussing the “potential” of AI when he discovered that Putin has a dramatically different interpretation of what that might be.

According to state-funded Russian broadcaster RT, the question baffled Volozh.  

“I hope never”, he replied after taking a pause to gather his thoughts. “It’s not the first machine to be better than humans at something. An excavator digs better than we do with a shovel. But we don’t get eaten by excavators. A car moves faster than we do…”

But Putin seemed unconvinced. “They don’t think,” he remarked.

Volozh acknowledged that it was true and scrambled back to his speech on AI’s merits.

Putin hasn’t always harbored such a pessimistic view of AI. When asked earlier this month by a group of kids about who would rule the world in the future, Putin said it would be whatever country manages to perfect artificial intelligence.

As RT points out, tech firms like Google and Facebook are developing new AI technology as an increasing number of online services rely on algorithms, including search engines, automated translation between languages, image enhancement and targeted advertising, an area that recently got Facebook into hot water when its self-reporting ad algos created a targeting category using the keywords "jew hater."

Musk has repeatedly warned that AI could cause World War III. Unless the technology is properly regulated, he said, it represents a much bigger threat to the security of the US than North Korea.

Of course, Musk has been criticized for his paranoid views by such tech luminaries as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who said he was “optimistic” about AI’s potential.

Whatever happens with AI, hopefully it doesn’t come to this.

 

How Google Rigs Search And Hurts Consumers

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

I’m sure all of you heard about the $2.7 billion fine imposed by the EU on Google as a result of its anti-competitive behavior, but not many of you probably know exactly what the search giant did to earn it. To shine some light on the topic, let’s take a look at a few excerpts from a recent article written by Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer Gary Reback.

Below are some choice excerpts from the piece, You Should Be Outraged at Google’s Anti-Competitive Behavior:

Before 2007, if a user searched for a product on Google, other sites listing prices for that product would appear among the general search results, ranked in the order of their quality to users. These “comparison shopping sites” were designed to identify merchants with the lowest prices. The more accurate and comprehensive their results, the higher they were ranked and the more traffic they generated.

But the more successful that comparison shopping sites became, the more they threatened Google’s business plan. Google makes money by selling ads placed next to its free search results, and merchants could not be expected to bid for ad placement if the listings in comparison shopping sites on the same search undercut their prices.

To address this, Google developed a cunning plan, the first phase of which was documented in a report by the FTC. Portions of the report were published by the Wall Street Journal more than two years ago.

Quoting internal Google documents and emails, the report shows that the company created a list of rival comparison shopping sites that it would artificially lower in the general search results, even though tests showed that Google users “liked the quality of the [rival] sites” and gave negative feedback on the proposed changes.

Google reworked its search algorithm at least four times, the documents show, and altered its established rating criteria before the proposed changes received “slightly positive” user feedback. Internal Google documents predicted that the proposed changes would reduce rivals’ user traffic up to 20 percent and subsequently reported producing the desired results once the changes were implemented.

At the same time, Google started putting the results from its own comparison shopping service at the top of search results. After these changes, the only source of low-price information readily available on Google’s search platform came from Google’s own comparison shopping service, known at the time as Google Product Search, which listed the lowest prices for products in its database at no charge to merchants.

Google’s conduct certainly hurt its rivals, particularly after a second round of search-listing demotions documented by the European Union. Many companies have been forced to lay off all of their employees and even shut down operations.

In 2012, Google took the extraordinary step to kill Google Product Search, replacing it with Google Shopping. This new service did not display the lowest price (or even a low price) in the general search results; rather, it displayed ads at the top of the search results page in response to the user’s search term. The ads were carefully placed by Google’s algorithms to minimize price competition among merchants, by, for example, showing ads next to each other that featured different product models at different price points.

Google Shopping also permitted merchants to purchase ads on a separate shopping page. Merchants — no longer promoted in search results for having lower prices — now must pay for better placement. Not surprisingly, they have raised prices to cover these costs.

Google’s competitors argued in a study, which I submitted to the European Commission a few years ago, that the prices in Google Shopping ads for specified products on search results pages were among the highest in Google’s database. Google’s displayed prices for everyday products, such as watches, anti-wrinkle cream and wireless routers, were roughly 50 percent higher — sometimes more — than those on rival sites. A subsequent study by a consumer protection group found similar results. A study by the Financial Times also documented the higher prices.

The Post’s editorial board claimed that the online availability of large merchant sites might restrain Google’s power over consumers. But those sites haven’t stopped Google from executing its plan so far. There is no denying that Google eliminated services showing the lowest prices, free to merchants, and replaced them with high-priced ads.

Some people like to blame all of the world’s problems on government.

Others blame business for everything that ever goes wrong.

I don’t fall into either of these categories. I think the greatest threat to humanity, freedom and our overall happiness comes down to concentrations of power.

Too much concentration of power within business or government ultimately leads to tyranny and oppression, and the best solution is for all of us to fight against concentrations of power in all its manifestations. Personally, I think Google has far too much power in a service as important to modern life as search, and it seems executives there are doing what always happens with concentrated power — abusing their position.

Visualizing The 100 Websites That Rule The Internet

There are over 1.1 billion websites on the internet, but the vast majority of all traffic actually goes to a very select list of them. As Visual Capitalist"s Jeff Desjardins notes, Google.com, for example, has an astounding 28 billion visits per month. The next closest is also a Google-owned property, Youtube.com, which brings in 20.5 billion visits.

Today’s infographic comes to us from Vodien, and it lists the 100 highest ranking websites in the U.S. by traffic, according to website analytics company Alexa.

The information is grouped by company – for example, you can see that Google controls four sites in the Top 100 (Google, Youtube, Blogger, and Google User Content), while Verizon owns the Huffington Post and AOL.com (they will also control Yahoo and Tumblr when that deal closes in Q2). The data is also sorted by industry, so sites in a similar category are grouped in the same color.

A STEEP DROPOFF

The dropoff from #1 to #100 is significant. Google.com has 28 billion visits, but a website like Citi.com (ranked #98) only has 53 million visits a month. That’s a 500x difference!

Meanwhile, a website like Visualcapitalist.com gets one million visits per month, and is ranked #33,000 in the United States – a 50x difference from Citi. Further down the trail – there are literally millions of tiny websites that get thousands or just hundreds of visits per month, and some that don’t get any love at all.

The whole distribution is quite fascinating, and it is clear that the spoils go overwhelmingly to the very top of the food chain. However, that also means that there is an entire world of millions of websites out there that almost no one (except Google’s crawler) has ever seen.