Yahoo Insider And Former Exec Believes Massive Security Breach Could Affect Billions Of Accounts

To call this a stressful time for Yahoo would be an understatement. As the company is in the process of being scooped up by Verizon, it's also dealing with the aftermath of what could become the largest security breach in all of history - at least in terms of users impacted.

We reported last week that the company was slapped with a class action suit a mere day after it was discovered that upwards of 500 million user accounts were affected in a security breach. Today, an insider and former Yahoo exec claims that the real number could be double that - cue diabolical pinky finger to mouth: 1 billion (Or perhaps even higher).

Yahoo's Marissa Mayer has a tough job on her hands right now

This unknown former executive reaches this conclusion based on the knowledge of Yahoo's back-end systems. He claims that because of how the entire system is structured, an attack of this level would have been far more catastrophic. Essentially, if someone managed to breach as much as 500 million, there's little reason to believe other accounts would be left untouched.

While this person is no longer an executive at the company, he remains in close contact with his peers at the company, some of whom have been directly affected by this breach. It could be that information being passed back and forth there helped fuel some of this belief. So where did the 500 million figure come from? This anonymous source offers little help here: how they came up with 500 million is a mystery."

Whether 500 million was chosen as a safe bet, or based on real evidence, we're not sure. But given just how high-profile this case is, it's only a matter of time before the truth comes out as digital forensics dig deeper into the debacle.