Yahoo to Pay $50M in Damages For the Biggest Ever, Hack

Yahoo’s historic hack finally sees the light of the day.

Yahoo has agreed to pay $50 million in damage because of the data breach that hit about 1 billion records, affecting around 200 million individuals.

Because of the settlement, Yahoo will likewise give two years of free credit-monitoring service to those individuals, whose email addresses and other individual data were stolen as a part of the greatest security breach ever.

The compensation depends on government court endorsement of a settlement documented late Monday in a 2-year-old claim looking to consider Yahoo responsible for digital thefts that happened in 2013 and 2014, yet weren’t unveiled until 2016.

The breach included email addresses, users’ birth dates, names and telephone numbers, among other things that were stolen.

Yahoo is now owned by Verizon, later found that every one of the 3 billion of its user had been affected by the breach- a few billion more than what is estimated.

The settlement came to San Francisco court covers around 1 billion of those records held by an expected 200 million individuals.

Some of the hackers are feared to be supported and sponsored by Russia.

Yahoo still has no clue how the breach happened that led to this attack that literally shook the world.

However, the company maintains that users’ passwords, credit card numbers and bank account information was not stolen as a result of the breach.

It wasn’t until 2017 that Yahoo revealed all 3 billion of its users had been hit by a data breach.

Yahoo is now part of a Verizon unit called Oath. Once the deal was closed, then-CEO Marissa Mayer stepped down.

Mayer was not paid her 2016 bonus, worth as much as $2million, nor her 2017 equity grants as a result of the hacking incidents.

In court papers, Yahoo had argued that the breaches were ‘a triumph of criminal persistence’ by a ‘veritable ‘who’s who’ of cybercriminals’ and that no security system is hack-proof.

Last year, the US Department of Justice charged two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service and two hackers in connection with the second breach in late 2014.