Archive for May, 2017

What is the cost of a data breach? In the case of Yahoo! CEO Marissa Meyer, who accepted the consequences of the 2013/2014 Yahoo data breach in 2016, the answer was at least $2 million, the amount of the annual bonus she lost because of the breach. She also gave up her annual equity grant for 2017, which could have been worth millions more. However, it probably cost Yahoo!, its partners and its users a lot more than that. What happened and what could have been done to prevent these types of breaches? The data breach in question actually refers to two major data breaches, one in 2013 and one in 2014, affecting an estimated 1 billion plus Yahoo! users and resulting in more than 40 class-action lawsuits from Yahoo! customers. Not only did the attackers hack hundreds of millions of user accounts for their information, but they also created bogus cookies in 2015 and 2016 to allow access to more than 30 million accounts without a password. Experts investigating noted that Yahoo! information security had knowledge of the attacks around the time they were happening, but failed to act appropriately. The company’s general counsel, Ron Bell, resigned without severance in the wake of this situation. ...