In the summer of 2013, Yahoo Inc launched a project to better secure the passwords of its customers, abandoning the use of a discredited technology for encrypting data known as MD5.
It was too late. In August of that year, hackers got hold of more than a billion Yahoo accounts, stealing the poorly encrypted passwords and other information in the biggest data breach on record. Yahoo only recently uncovered the hack and disclosed it last week.
The timing of the attack might seem like bad luck, but the weakness of MD5 had been known by hackers and security experts for more than a decade. MD5 can be cracked more easily than other so-called "hashing" algorithms, which are mathematical functions that convert data into seemingly random character strings.
In 2008, five years before Yahoo took action, Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute issued a public warning to security professionals through a U.S. government-funded vulnerability alert system: MD5 "should be considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use."
( source: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/i...-story-too-little-too-033046361--finance.html )
It was too late. In August of that year, hackers got hold of more than a billion Yahoo accounts, stealing the poorly encrypted passwords and other information in the biggest data breach on record. Yahoo only recently uncovered the hack and disclosed it last week.
The timing of the attack might seem like bad luck, but the weakness of MD5 had been known by hackers and security experts for more than a decade. MD5 can be cracked more easily than other so-called "hashing" algorithms, which are mathematical functions that convert data into seemingly random character strings.
In 2008, five years before Yahoo took action, Carnegie Mellon University's Software Engineering Institute issued a public warning to security professionals through a U.S. government-funded vulnerability alert system: MD5 "should be considered cryptographically broken and unsuitable for further use."
( source: https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/i...-story-too-little-too-033046361--finance.html )
