Yahoo Inc's security problems - a story of too little, too late

San Francisco

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.