Yahoo will have a slew of legal actions waiting for it, as the company recently admitted that personal data belonging to more than 500 million users was stolen during a hack.
The lawsuits are accusing the company of gross negligence — failing to secure customer data that led to the data breach from 2014.
The latest complaint was filed on Friday, Sept. 23, in federal court in San Jose, California.
According to the plaintiff, Yahoo failed both to establish and deploy elementary data security protocols. This caused "personal information [to fall] in the hands of criminals and/or enemies of the U.S.,"
The New York resident who began the legal action aims to transform it into a class-action status where other Yahoo users are also represented. Cases of the same nature were filed to courts in San Diego and Illinois.
Details about the magnitude of the data breach come at a truly poor time for Marissa Mayer, the CEO of Yahoo. This is because Verizon Communications Inc. is currently in the process of purchasing the company in a deal that will cost Big Red $4.8 billion. The transaction is set to close at the beginning of 2017, but the data breach scandal might give Verizon second thoughts about the price it is willing to pay for Yahoo.
Mayer helmed the company through some pretty rough times, and many have blamed her for the notorious lack of vision that Yahoo showcased in the later years. The e-mail service was pelleted with complaints that caused a myriad of users to migrate to rival services such as Google.
Charles Stewart, the spokesman for Yahoo, did not comment on the San Jose complaint.
Compromised Accounts
Plaintiff Ronald Schwartz wants the court to force Yahoo to deliver compensations to users who suffered any damages resulting from fraud. He also asks that Yahoo take the appropriate measures to identify and safeguard compromised accounts.
Schwartz chastised the company for its sluggish approach that caused it to unveil the 2014 data breach only a few months ago.
"[Yahoo's] misconduct ... allowed unauthorized and malicious access to plaintiff's and the class's personal information," reads the complaint.
The fact that the unhindered malicious access kept going for two years makes matters even worse, Schwartz points out. The complaint also underlines that security experts usually detect such security issues three times faster than Yahoo did.
This week, Yahoo confirmed that the hijacked information may include names, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, encrypted passwords, dates of birth and even security questions and answers.
Yahoo vouches that the attacker is no longer in the network and points out that its internal investigation does not support the fact that payment card data or bank account information theft occurred.
