Breaking news surfaced in San Francisco that approximately 500 million Yahoo accounts were either hacked into or stolen.

The size of this cyber attack is said to be the biggest one seen yet, which also sparks the possibility that another country may be behind the attack. There is not much information about who did this, but the FBI is working to crack down on the possible suspects of these hackings.

“We take these types of breaches very seriously and will determine how this occurred and who is responsible,” said the agency via email on Thursday.

Due to Yahoo’s large userbase, Yahoo notified people of the recent hack that occurred so that  they could do what they felt was best to secure their accounts. Many people changed their passwords to something a little more complex, as well as resetting their security questions.

“My Yahoo account was hacked back in 2014, I was not receiving expected emails, and started receiving spam mail from Yahoo. Nothing major, I just changed my password and it didn’t happen again.” WHHS history teacher Robert Hittinger explains.

Verizon also has decided to cut ties with Yahoo. As of right now, their $4.8 billion deal is expected to close in the first quarter of next year. This has resulted in Yahoo having a decline in users by approximately five to 10 million people. 

For other users, larger problems occurred. Data such as security questions, phone numbers, linked email addresses and dates of birth had been accessed by the thief. 

To prevent further issues, in 2015 Yahoo introduced “Account Key” a service that works by using push notifications on your smartphone to confirm whether you are trying to sign into your Yahoo account on another device or not. The notification then provides a key made up of letters to access your account in the other app. This system is equivalent to having two passwords, a consistent one chosen by the user and one that is constantly changing and is randomly chosen by the system.

The only major flaw of this arrangement is that it relies on the user’s mobile phone. So if the phone is lost or broken it will become very difficult to access the account if not already logged into another device. This change has resulted in many Yahoo users switching over to other similar services that were not experiencing a problem.

“The system was too confusing and complicated, I just switched to google,” Diana Rondi.