All of Yahoo's 3 billion accounts were affected by 2013 hacking

Yahoo headquarters in Sunnyvale, California.
(Image credit: Getty Images)

The 2013 Yahoo data breach was much larger than previously disclosed, with every single account affected, Yahoo's parent company, Verizon, announced Tuesday.

When Yahoo revealed in late 2016 that hackers stole information from users three years earlier, it said that 1 billion accounts were likely affected, but Verizon said it recently learned the breach actually hit 3 billion accounts. The hackers stole personal information, including names, birth dates, email addresses, phone numbers, scrambled passwords, and security questions and answers, Yahoo said, but not credit card or bank account information. Yahoo has been unable to track down the perpetrators.

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.