The volume of traffic between Yahoo's back end admin system and the wider internet during the attack strongly suggested that a file of 22 million IDs had been stolen.
But what happens to the Internet when such an attack is launched?
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The line between television and the internet has come under attack over the past few years, and you can partially thank or blame Sigma Designs CEO and Co-founder Thinh Q.
Two journalists wounded in the same attack have made internet appeals for medical help.
How to support an "always on" business environment, yet defend assets from cyber attack via the Internet, is now a major concern.
"I don't think anybody from this school could be smart enough to attack a big Internet company like Google, " said Zhang Jian, a 22-year-old auto-repair student dressed in a basketball jersey and flip flops.
So says the BBC, that the internet is currently suffering under the largest cyber-attack yet known and that this is slowing down traffic and sites right across the internet.
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So why, more than a week after those companies' software patches were publicly released, do millions of Internet users remain vulnerable to the attack?
In the battlespace of the global internet, it is hard to know what effects a retaliatory attack might have on another country, and on those citizens and companies that might rely on internet connectivity or other critical infrastructure.
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Many Internet security experts consider the first virus attack on the PC to have occurred in 1986.
"iPhoneDevSDK has learned it was used as part of an attack whose victims included large Internet companies, " read a message at the top of the site's home page Wednesday.
Facebook, in a blog post, on Friday said it discovered the attack after finding a suspicious Internet domain in its computer logs that it traced to a single employee laptop.
While the nature of this threat landscape is uncertain, the potential damage a cyber-attack could pose to our internet-dependent telecommunications, power and even water infrastructure, has seen cyber security rise sharply up government agendas around the world in the last five years.
Hackers infected banner ads run by marketing firms such as Germany's Falk Esolutions, causing users who visited certain Web sites displaying Falk ads to download a Trojan horse that steals credit card numbers by exploiting yet another undetected vulnerability in Microsoft's Internet Explorer (a zero-day attack, once again).
In a statement, US attorney Paul Fishman said Auernheimer "concocted" the story that the attack was done to make the internet more secure only after he got into trouble for the 2010 hack.
If the millions of internet-connected Macs are left open to attack then this increases the chance that an effective Trojan or piece of spyware will reach critical mass and spread rapidly, and it also increases the incentive for a bright programmer to write Mac-specific malware that could affect me.
The indictment said Mr Rivera had helped to post the confidential information onto the internet, and had been involved in publicising the attack on Twitter.
Writing on the blog of digital rights lobby group the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Peter Eckersley, said the attack posed a "dire risk to internet security".
Media reports have blared the not-too-surprising fact that Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones had reached the Internet a few days before being officially released.
According to those who have followed the attack at the SANS Institute's Internet Storm Center, a cybersecurity crisis response organization, the infection tool is partially written in Chinese characters and compiled on a computer with Chinese language settings.
Such phrases are vulnerable to a dictionary attack based on common phrases taken from the internet.
Last July, Parry Aftab, a prominent Internet security advocate, became the victim of such an attack.
If a user's network--or the Internet at large--slows down because of an attack, it could affect phone calls.
Internet activist group Anonymous has said calls for it to attack the website of controversial anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church were a hoax.
Security experts say patterns of activity on the Internet could indicate that a new computer worm is about to attack.
Hackers simply load a program from the Internet and put it in the url of the site they want to attack.
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Internet security firm Mandiant, which was hired by the Times to trace the attack, followed the hackers' movements for four months, to try to establish a pattern and block them.
Forbes colleague Kelly Clay has posted five reasons why Website publishers to should leave GoDaddy, the Internet registrar and site host hit today with a massive distributed denial of service attack, allegedly by hackers who claim to be aligned with Anonymous, the shadowy online activist group.
So Internet service providers "have no answer today" to protect against this type of attack.
One man even died last year from a heart attack brought on by the stress of spending days waging war in an Internet game.
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