Over 1 billion accounts affected from Yahoo data breach

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New Delhi : The tech giant Yahoo has announced a fresh data breach on their server, affecting over 1 billion user accounts.

The breach dates back to 2013 and is thought to be separate from a massive cyber security incident announced in September, the company revealed on Wednesday.

"For potentially affected accounts, the stolen user account information may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords (using MD5) and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers," said Bob Lord, Chief Information Security Officer, Yahoo, in a blog post.

"Based on the ongoing investigation, we believe an unauthorised third party accessed our proprietary code to learn how to forge cookies. The outside forensic experts have identified user accounts for which they believe forged cookies were taken or used," Lord added.

As a measure of security, the company is now contacting users, asking them to change their used id passwords.