Yahoo is warning users of potentially malicious activity on their accounts between 2015 and 2016, the latest in a string of cybersecurity problems faced by the technology company.

The measure comes two months after the company revealed that data from more than 1bn user accounts had been compromised in August 2013, the largest such breach in history. The number of affected accounts was double the number implicated in a 2014 breach the internet company disclosed in September and blamed on state-sponsored hackers. Yahoo believes that the cookie-forging activity is linked to the same state-sponsored hackers.

As any investigator can tell you, it's not just what you knew, but when you knew it. Yahoo admitted that not long after a hack in 2014 some of its employees were aware a state-sponsored hacker had breached its network.

The revelation is sure to cast a larger shadow over Verizon's $4.8 billion deal to acquire the company. Yahoo said that an investigation had uncovered the theft of personal information associated with at least a half billion Yahoo accounts, the biggest data breach in history. The company said at the time that it discovered the massive intrusion after a hacker claimed in August to have snatched 200 million Yahoo usernames and passwords in an earlier hack.

Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers' incoming emails for specific information provided by US intelligence officials.

The company complied with a classified US government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest of the NSA or FBI, said three former employees and a fourth person apprised of the events. Some surveillance experts said this represents the first case to surface of a US Internet company agreeing to an intelligence agency's request by searching all arriving messages, as opposed to examining stored messages or scanning a small number of accounts in real time.

At least half a billion Yahoo accounts have been breached by what investigators believe is a nation-sponsored hacking operation.

Attackers probably gained access to a wealth of holders' personal information, including names, e-mail addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, answers to security questions, and cryptographically protected passwords. With at least 500 million accounts included in Yahoo's official statement, the breach is among the biggest ever to hit a single Web property. Yahoo is also in the process of notifying potentially affected account holders of the breach and asking them to promptly change their passwords.

A strain of French-language cyber espionage malware spotted by security researchers shows that the National Security Agency isn’t the only spook agency brewing custom bad things to steal sensitive and personal data.

The malware was tied to a spying exercise codenamed Operation Snowglobe, which also spawned a seemingly related remote access trojan codenamed EvilBunny. Implants associated with Snowglobe are more advanced than Babar itself, which Canadian spies discovered in November 2009. Babar’s feature set includes keystroke logging, clipboard logging, screenshot snapping and, more unusually, the possibility to log audio conversations held through Skype messenger.

A secret and scrappy court battle that Yahoo launched to resist the NSA’s PRISM spy program came to an end in 2008 after the Feds threatened the internet giant with a massive $250,000 a day fine if it didn’t comply and a court ruled that Yahoo’s arguments for resisting had no merit.

The detail of the threat became public after 1,500 pages worth of documents were unsealed in the case, revealing new information about the aggressive battle the Feds fought to force the company to bow to its demands. Yahoo fought to unseal the case documents to provide better transparency about the government’s data collection programs.

Google’s handling of “right to be forgotten” requests from European citizens will come under fire from the continent’s privacy watchdogs on Thursday, after the search engine restricted the removal of Internet links to European sites only.

European data protection authorities are meeting representatives of Google, Microsoft, which operates the Bing search engine, and Yahoo to discuss the implementation of the landmark ruling from Europe’s top court upholding people’s right to request that outdated links be removed from Internet search results. European Union privacy watchdogs have several concerns on the way the ruling, which has pitted privacy advocates against free speech defenders, is being implemented, particularly by Google, according to a person familiar with the matter.

LAST year, I spent more than $2,200 and countless hours trying to protect my privacy. Some of the items I bought — a $230 service that encrypted my data in the Internet cloud; a $35 privacy filter to shield my laptop screen from coffee-shop voyeurs; and a $420 subscription to a portable Internet service to bypass untrusted connections — protect me from criminals and hackers. Other products, like a $5-a-month service that provides me with disposable email addresses and phone numbers, protect me against the legal (but, to me, unfair) mining and sale of my personal data.

In our data-saturated economy, privacy is becoming a luxury good. After all, as the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you are the product. And currently, we aren’t paying for very much of our technology.

Facebook, Microsoft, Yahoo and Google on Monday began publishing details about the number of secret government requests for data they receive, hoping to show limited involvement in controversial U.S. surveillance efforts.

The tech industry has pushed for greater transparency on government data requests, seeking to shake off concerns about their involvement in vast, surreptitious surveillance programs revealed last summer by former spy contractor Edward Snowden. The government said last month it would relax rules restricting what details companies can disclose about Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders they receive for user information.

Representatives of Obama‘s Administration continue to insist that spying on Americans is not a violation of constitutional rights of citizens and carried out exclusively in the interests of national security.

However, Chris Kitts, the father of beforeitsnews.com, believes that the obtained information is used not only for security purposes.

According to Chris Kitts, Washington creates “The machine for the implementation blackmail. Now they have access to the emails of people who are in the data store in Utah.