Yahoo facing lawsuits in the wake of massive data breach

“Labaton Sucharow LLP and Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd LLP jointly filed a class action today against Yahoo… concerning an unprecedented breach of the tech giant’s security affecting approximately 500 million users”, the release stated on Friday. Users of Yahoo online services were urged to review accounts for suspicious activity and change passwords and security question information used to log in anywhere else if it matched that at Yahoo.

Verizon, which said Thursday it learned of the breach within the past two days, agreed in July to pay US$4.83 billion (RM19.93 billion) for Yahoo’s core business. In a policy statement previous year, Lord also said the company wouldn’t release details about why it believes attacks are state-sponsored because it doesn’t want to risk disclosing its methods of investigating breaches. Security analysts have termed this as the biggest hacking in history involving a single company.

“Names, email addresses, date of birth and scrambled passwords may have been stolen”, Yahoo said. Do not use the same password across multiple sites. “Yahoo and other companies have launched programs to detect and notify users when a company strongly suspects that a state-sponsored actor has targeted an account”.

“When I’m talking to individual companies around the globe, you’d be shocked how many people use the same two or three or four passwords”, says Miller Newton, CEO of security firm PKWare. What they don’t realize is that it’s still active and their information is still associated with it. More recently, news reports say USA intelligence officials have blamed Russian spies for the hack of Democratic National Committee files, although Russia’s government has also denied this.

“Yahoo has never had reason to believe there is any connection between the security issue disclosed yesterday and the claims publicized by a hacker in August 2016”.

A Yahoo spokeswoman said the Sunnyvale, California-based company does not discuss pending litigation.

For Yahoo’s users, security firms are offering the advice that’s become nearly routine to hear alongside reports of major data breaches: Pick strong passwords and don’t reuse them, store them in a password manager if possible and enable two-factor authentication with services that support it.

In a statement, Verizon said: “We will evaluate as the investigation continues through the lens of overall Verizon interests, including consumers, customers, shareholders and related communities”.