CYBERSECURITY: Yahoo Triples Estimate of Breached Accounts to 3 Billion.

The figure, which Verizon said was based on new information, is three times the 1 billion accounts Yahoo said were affected when it first disclosed the breach in December 2016. The new disclosure, four months after Verizon completed its acquisition of Yahoo, shows that executives are still coming to grips with the extent of the security problem in what was already the largest hacking incident in history by number of user accounts.

A spokesman for Oath, the Verizon unit that now includes Yahoo, said the company determined within the past week that the break-in was much worse than thought, after it received new information from outside the company. He declined to elaborate on that information. Compromised customer information included usernames, passwords, and in some cases telephone numbers and dates of birth, the spokesman said.

Several other major cyberattacks recently have focused attention on the vulnerability of big companies that possess enormous amounts of vital personal information about their customers.

An awful lot of people gave an awful lot of their personal information to companies who clearly have no idea what they’re doing.

For a few bucks a month, you can own your own domain at a small hosting company, which is a much smaller target than any of these data behemoths. Clearly, free email is actually worth far less than you pay for it.