Yahoo may owe you up to $358 due to a class action settlement over hacks between 2012 and 2016

In May, a Reuters investigation found that Russia’s criminal underworld is trading hundreds of millions of stolen usernames and passwords belonging to Yahoo, Gmail and Hotmail accounts.

According to Alex Holden, founder and chief information security officer of Wisconsin-based Hold Security, the details of 272.3million stolen accounts are now being traded.

Of this batch, Yahoo Mail credentials totaled 40million, or 15 per cent of the haul.

They are separate from this hack, however, which in August was revealed to have provided hacker ‘Peace’ with the credentials of 200million Yahoo accounts, which he was offering on the dark web for just 3 bitcoins – roughly $1,860.

And now Yahoo is saying that 500million accounts, and their attached email addresses, personal information and hashed passwords, were compromised. 

That puts the beleaguered tech company at the top of the unhappy league table of hacking victims. 

According to Graphiq, Yahoo is comfortably – or uncomfortably – ahead of a 2007 hack that compromised the credit and debit card details of 94million customers of TJX Companies, which owns TJ/TK Maxx and other off-price retailers.

Just beneath is AOL, which lost 92million screen names and emails to an employee in 2004. That employee then sold the data to spammers, who used them to send 7billion unsolicited emails.

More recently, JP Morgan Chase became the worst-hit US banking company ever in 2014, with 83million records compromised.

They are followed by Anthem, Inc (2013, 80million customers’ personal details, social security numbers and healthcare ID numbers compromised); Target (2014, 40million shoppers’ card details breached); and Home Depot (2014, 56million credit card accounts hacked).