Who would want access to 1 billion Yahoo accounts?

"If this most recent attack is also state-sponsored, says Albert Gidari, the director of Privacy at the Stanford Center for Internet and Society, "it's government espionage that's really at issue."

Gidari says the size of the breach fits the profile of a government actor, which is typically motivated by an interest in collecting "large volumes of data that gets warehoused for future reference."