A former Yahoo executive has claimed that the Yahoo breach that compromised some 500 million user accounts was far worse than the firm is claiming.

The claim is backed by the executive’s knowledge of Yahoo’s systems. The anonymous executive spoke to Business Insider and said that due to the type of hack being reported the breach would have exposed as many as 1 billion user account details.

The executive claims the search engine operator stores all of its user data in one centralised database . This would mean that whether a user was logging into Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Finance, their details were stored in one location.

The Yahoo executive claimed that, at the time of the hack, this centralised database held in the region of 700 million and 1 billion user accounts.

“I believe it to be bigger than what’s being reported,” the executive told Business Insider. “How they came up with 500 [million] is a mystery.”

You can’t get all the loot

So were Yahoo’s last two missives about the breach false? With the information we have on hand its hard to say. While the claims that Yahoo housed all user data in one location may be true, hackers can’t always make off with everything on a server.

This might be because a cyber criminal doesn’t want to draw attention to the fact that large chunks of data are being transferred out of a server or simply because they can only extract information one tiny piece at a time.

The exact amount of data that was compromised during the hack has just gone up since news broke.

Initially it was thought 200 million accounts had been compromised, then Yahoo confirmed that in fact 500 million users had had their information stolen.

Whatever the real amount is, we urge users to change any passwords you’ve used that were once tied to a Yahoo account.

[Via – Business Insider][Image – CC BY SA 2.0 Esther Vargas]