Massive leak might affect hundreds of millions of Yahoo accounts

Last month a hacker by the name of Peace claimed to possess information of millions upon millions of Yahoo accounts. At that point Yahoo did not comment on whether or not the leak had actually happened but said they would investigate. Now new information has it that the leak has happened.

Re/code's Kara Swisher suggests that the leak has indeed happened even though Yahoo has yet to confirm the fact. Furthermore Swisher is saying that Yahoo has the information but is trying to come up with a good strategy before reveling it to the public.

The hacker claimed to have information, such as usernames, easily decrypted passwords, as well as personal information like email addresses and birth dates of over 200 million users. The extent of the leak was not confirmed by Re/code's sources but they said it was "widespread and serious."

This might complicate things the acquisition by Verizon. Obviously the new owner of Yahoo would rather not have a burden of such a huge problem and this might affect the $4.8 billion price tag.