Yahoo has discovered a three-year-old security breach that enabled a hacker to compromise more than one billion user accounts.
The announcement comes just a few months after Yahoo announced a separate breach that affected at least 500 million users, which had been the most far-reaching hack, until Wednesday's revelation.
WOKV Consumer Warrior Clark Howard says you need to set up two-factor authentication right away.
"It's something Yahoo is trying to get people to do. In fact, I got a message from Yahoo out of the blue, trying to get me to go to two-factor authentication. That's where when you sign in to an account you have to cross verify a second way as well", said Howard.
Stolen user information may have included names, email addresses, hashed passwords and in some cases security questions and answers. They don't believe financial information or clear text passwords are affected.
"The thing with these data breaches is they are so frequent and the amount of data is so extensive that on the black market where people buy information like this, the value of the information keeps going down and down. So what that means is that once a breach has occurred, the problem for you could be way down the road. It's kind of like a very slow motion time bomb", said Howard.
He also recommends you not use Yahoo for important emails.
"It's a better idea to use something like GMail as your principal email service and use Yahoo as a dump for all those things from retailers that send you 8 million sales notices, and don't use it for anything significant or central to your life", Howard said.
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