How much is the hacked Yahoo database worth? Try $300,000

It’s been yet another bad week for Yahoo, the perpetually beleaguered internet giant based in Sunnyvale, California. This past September, we learned of an enormous 2014 hack into its user database that compromised 500 million accounts. That would be the tip of the iceberg, as this week another larger hack came to light — a staggering billion accounts were hacked in 2013.

When you’re dealing with numbers of this size, a lot of money goes along with it. The New York Times says that last August, a shadowy “hacking collective in Eastern Europe” began offering the hacked data for sale — this from Andrew Komarov, who is chief intelligence officer at InfoArmor, a cybersecurity outfit out of Arizona that deals in “advanced threat intelligence” and monitors the seamy areas of the internet that are populated by crooks, scammers, spammers, and spies. The Times says that “two known spammers and an entity that appeared more interested in espionage paid about $300,000 each for a complete copy of the database.”