The email giant, Yahoo Incorporated, was sued last Friday by an active user of Yahoo, accusing the company of gross negligence during a massive-scaled hack-attack back in 2014. This hack had contained private information from, at the very least, 500 million Yahoo accounts.
This lawsuit had been filed inside the Federal court located in San Jose, California. Just one day after the company had disclosed the information related to the attack of an unprecedented size, they stated their belief that this was a simple “state-sponsored act.”
However, Ronald Schwartz, a resident of New York, didn’t think so. In fact, he pushed through and sued Yahoo Inc. on behalf of all of the active Yahoo users residing within the United States, and to those who had their personal information compromised. This type of lawsuit had also sought out the class-action status, as well as the unspecified amount of damages that Yahoo has suffered.
At Sunnyvale, a spokeswoman on behalf of Yahoo, stated she will not provide any information related to the pending litigation.
This major attack may have created some complications for the Chief Executive Officer, Marissa Mayer, in regards to their efforts in attempting to “shore up” their website’s fortunes. Within just two months, she had agreed to a massive $4.8 billion-dollar sale of the company’s Internet business. Verizon Communications Inc. was confirmed as the one to make the business purchase.
Just last Thursday, Yahoo stated that the user information in which had been compromised consisted of names, email address, birth dates, phone numbers, and secured encrypted passwords of existing Yahoo users. This information was in fact compromised back in the late months of 2014.
However, this lawsuit provides information in which suggests that this massive breach may have been warded off Yahoo, as they have been targeted by several hackers in the past. If the company had been taking their user privacy “seriously” with previous attacks, and would have “beefed” up their security protocols, this lawsuit may have been avoided with reasonable ease.
Yahoo is also sitting at fault as they have taken roughly three-times longer then a typical organization would need, in order to recover from these breaches.
Yahoo has also demonstrated their recklessness and their disregard towards their cyber security for their respective users on a more personal level, by not properly ensuring that their promise to keep their users protected didn’t fail.
Schwartz, acting as a representative for the two massive United States’ class-action specialists, is from the law firm Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Labaton Sucharow.
Sources: Profit NDTV.
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