Top lawyer resigns and CEO leaves annual bonus as 32 million Yahoo accounts hacked

The most senior lawyer at Yahoo resigned following a report which found that the company didn’t look into the case involving hack of 32 million Yahoo accounts. The CEO at Yahoo also declined her 2016 bonus and stock awards for this year.

A company’s internal investigation found out that the legal team of the said company had sufficient information to follow inquiry into a hack attack, but didn’t properly investigate it. The General Counsel at Yahoo, Ronald Bell, resigned yesterday over the said matter with no payments being made to him. The Chief Executive Officer at Yahoo, Marissa Mayer, also declined any of the last year’s monetary awards.

The findings were made in a Yahoo filing that it made to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The report confirmed that more than 32 million Yahoo accounts were hacked in various hack attacks that occurred in the last couple of years.

The report said that some senior executives at Yahoo didn’t follow up on the breach properly. The document read, “The Independent Committee found that failures in communication, management, inquiry and internal reporting contributed to the lack of proper comprehension and handling of the 2014 Security Incident.”

“When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies,” Mayer said on her Tumblr. Admitting the fault, she agreed to let go her bonuses from last year, both the annual bonus and equity grant. The bonus will now be distributed among lower-tier Yahoo employees.

Source — Bloomberg, Image — NBC