Yahoo data breach is among the biggest in history

At least 500 million user accounts have been stolen from Yahoo, the company confirmed on Thursday.

The data breach is the largest from a single site in history, according to a database of other hacking incidents. In August, hackers were discovered trying to sell 200 million Yahoo accounts, which would have been the second-largest single breach.

Recode reported on Thursday morning that the company was poised to confirm the compromised data and that it was even worse than originally believed. The data, which was stolen in late 2014 by what the company called a “state-sponsored actor,” may include names, emails, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords, and security questions and answers, but not financial information, according to the company.

Russian hackers pulled off what seems like a much bigger haul of 1.2 billion users in 2014, but that data was stolen from hundreds of thousands of sites and combined into a single collection.