Yahoo CEO loses cash bonus over security breaches

Forged cookies allow an intruder to access a user’s account without a password.

Yahoo had earlier stated the hacking attempts had the backing of a foreign government that enabled them to pull off something this massive.

It will be controlled by a reduced board, after Marissa Mayer and several other directors committed to resigning upon the deal’s completion.

Yahoo took some action, notifying 26 specifically targeted users and consulting with police, according to the company.

Last September, the company revealed that “at least” 500 million users may have had their details stolen in 2013, with “state-sponsored” hackers reportedly to blame. In a security filing the company admits that following an investigation, the Independent Committee concluded that the company’s information security team had knowledge of the compromise of user accounts when it happened.

The company’s internal investigation found that Yahoo’s security team knew of the hacks that compromised millions of user accounts in 2015 and 2016.

Yahoo has become synonymous with data breaches in recent times, becoming an unwanted record holder past year after admitting to the biggest data breach in history which saw a billion user accounts hacked. Three months after this, Yahoo revealed it uncovered a separate hack in 2013 affecting about 1 billion accounts.

Quiz: How much do you know about the world of Yahoo? “The forged cookies have been invalidated by the Company so they can not be used to access user accounts”, Yahoo added.

Yahoo had a bad time in 2016.

Marissa Mayer, the 41-year-old president and CEO of Yahoo (not to be confused with Marissa Meyer, who is an American novelist), has been with the company since 2012.

It’s unclear what role Mayer will play in either company in the future.

The report didn’t identify the negligent executives, but it chastised the company’s legal department for not looking more deeply into the 2014 breach. Base salary for Mayer is $1 million annually. This was all foregone by Mayer, who instead redistributed it to the company’s staff.

The company has been deep into the investigations of the two security lapses that have taken a major toll. Yahoo hasn’t disclosed what her bonus previous year would have been or the value of the 2017 stock grants she’s giving up, but for 2015 about 89 per cent of her realised compensation was equity. Mayer also asked the Yahoo board to distribute her bonus among all Yahoo employees.

The Yahoo board has made a decision to withhold CEO Marissa Meyer’s 2016 annual bonus in connection with a series of data breaches and accepted her offer to forego her 2017 stock award.

There has been considerable criticism and questioning of how well and how promptly Yahoo! senior management responded to the breaches.

Yahoo will receive another corporate identity and cut the size of its board if the proposed $4.8 billion offer of its digital services to Verizon Communications goes through.