This might be the final chapter in the Yahoo data breach gong show, maybe, as Yahoo is offering to pay $117.5 million to settle its massive data breaches that compromised personal information, including email addresses and passwords. “The proposed settlement was announced on Tuesday, but still needs to be approved by U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh,” reports CNN:
Earlier this year, a different version of the class-action settlement was rejected by Koh, who wanted to see more benefit to consumers and a specific settlement amount. Yahoo was hit by multiple data breaches from 2013 to 2016. The 2013 breach affected every single customer account that existed at the time, which totaled 3 billion. Yahoo previously said names, email addresses and passwords were compromised but not financial information.
This dollar amount is a trivial amount of cash for Yahoo. They basically are settling this for pennies on the dollar and haven’t truly been punished. This highlights the fact that strong legislation to really punish companies who screw up like Yahoo does. And of course only the lawyers will win.