Other web service data breaches pale in comparison to the 3-billion user Yahoo hack
When it was first announced in 2016, Yahoo's breach of over 1 billion user accounts went down as one of the worst in history. On Tuesday, Yahoo, which is now owned by Verizon, broke its own record when it released a statement admitting that all 3 billion of the user accounts that existed in 2013 had been hacked.
Huge breaches of consumer online services like Yahoo have become more common over the past few years. As we can see in this chart from Statista, the majority of hacks affecting web services have been nowhere near the size of the Yahoo breach. John Thune, Chairman of the U.S. Senate Commerce Committee said on Tuesday he plans to hold a hearing later this month over the breach. He will question witnesses on whether there were steps that could have been taken earlier, and if there is a possibility of more bad news.
