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Yahoo CEO reprimanded in fallout from data breach

Yahoo CEO reprimanded in fallout from data breach

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has agreed to forgo her annual bonus due to the multiple data breaches the technology company suffered during her tenure.

Marissa Mayer, who became CEO of Yahoo in 2012, released a statement on Tumblr that announced that she was giving up her annual bonus and equity grant because of the data breaches.

“I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year,” Mayer wrote.

Mayer continued that she hoped that her bonus and grant would go to Yahoo’s workers, who she says contributed much to the success of Yahoo in 2016. Yahoo has also seen its general counsel and secretary Ronald Bell resign without severance pay after the breaches.

Mayer’s announcement comes after the release of a report on the data breaches from an independent committee. The committee was set up to investigate events surrounding the response to the breaches. The report reprimanded the response of Yahoo’s management.

“While significant additional security measures were implemented in response to those incidents, it appears certain senior executives did not properly comprehend or investigate, and therefore failed to act sufficiently,” the report states.

The first breach occurred in August 2013, however Yahoo didn’t notice the issue until late last year when, according to a Tumblr post by Yahoo CISO Bob Lord, law enforcement approached them with information indicating a breach.

Yahoo’s investigation would reveal that data from over 1 billion users was taken, including passwords, usernames, emails and both unencrypted and encrypted security questions. This breach is considered to be the largest data breach in history.

The second breach occurred in late 2014, which say hackers obtain data from over 500 million users. Yahoo released a statement informing its users of a breach in September last year, calling it “a state-sponsored attack”.

These events are the latest in a string that have seen the breaches negatively Yahoo. In February, Yahoo was forced to discount their sale price by $350 million in their merger deal with Verizon, making the deal worth $4.48 billion.

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