Items tagged with (NASDAQ:YHOO)
The investigation regarding the 2014 Yahoo hack is finally getting somewhere. The United States Justice Department just announced the indictment of two members of the Russian intelligence agency FSB, and two hackers hired by the Russians. The spies managed to hack into 500 million Yahoo accounts. The charges against the four include hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage. The United States currently does not have an extradition treaty with Russia, which will make bringing the criminals to justice difficult. The Justice Department also noted that people sometimes slip away to countries that are less than willing to transfer the criminals to the United States for prosecution....
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Marissa Mayer’s tenure as Yahoo CEO is quickly winding down. The troubled internet portal has been in the news for all the wrong reasons following Verizon’s announcement last year that it would purchase the company for $4.83 billion. However, we are learning today that once Mayer steps down following the close of the deal with Verizon, she will be floating back to earth with a pretty snazzy golden parachute. Regulatory documents, which were filed today, shows that Mayer will receive a total of $23 million in compensation when she leaves the company. That figure includes roughly $3 million in cash, nearly $20 million in equity and another $24,000 in benefits. Those figures might at first glance...
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Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer has come under a lot of fire this year, especially for the number of security breaches the corporation has divulged. As a result, Mayer has decided to forgo her usual annual bonus and will instead redistribute it among the corporation’s employees. Mayer remarked on her Tumblr account, “I am the CEO of the company and since this incident happened during my tenure, I have agreed to forgo my annual bonus and my annual equity grant this year and have expressed my desire that my bonus be redistributed to our company’s hardworking employees, who contributed so much to Yahoo’s success in 2016.” Mayer’s post is not entirely honest. The CEO is not “giving up” her bonus. Mayer is...
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Verizon has made it official -- the company today revealed that it has mutually agreed to lower its purchase price of Yahoo by $350 million, bringing the total value of the deal down to $4.48 billion in cash. This follows a report from last week, which indicated that Verizon was seeking a $250 million to $350 million discount for the internet portal. “The amended terms of the agreement provide a fair and favorable outcome for shareholders,” stated Marni Walden, Verizon’s Executive Vice President and President of Product Innovation and New Businesses. For her part, current Yahoo CEO Marisa Mayer chimed in, writing, “We continue to be very excited to join forces with Verizon and AOL. This transaction...
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Everyone loves a discount, especially when that discount ranges in the millions of dollars. Verizon is reportedly trying to reduce the $4.83 billion USD price tag for Yahoo, Inc. by $250 million. The renegotiation is in light of Yahoo’s disclosures of past security breaches. Yahoo revealed three security breaches this past year. In May, the corporation disclosed that Russian hackers stole and traded on the black market information from more than 40 million Yahoo accounts. The information was mostly from American banking, manufacturing, and retail outfits. This past summer, a hacker known as “Peace” listed 200 million Yahoo accounts for 3 bitcoins or roughly $1,800 USD. In December, the corporation...
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By now you might have heard that Yahoo is changing its name to Altaba following its sale to Verizon Communications, and that Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is stepping down from the company's board of directors. News of Yahoo's fate spread like wildfire last night after Yahoo posted a filing with the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) detailing the changes, though there are a few things that need clarifying. One of them is that Yahoo probably is not going to disappear.Let's back up a moment. Verizon agreed to purchase Yahoo's search engine and web properties for $4.83 billion back in July of 2015. Not included in the pending deal are the investments that Yahoo's shareholders made,...
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The growing consensus is that the U.S. government is overstepping its bounds and trampling on people's right to privacy. Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden blew the whistle on the government's vast spying program, and while that was an eye opener for the country (and world) at large, the full extent of its efforts are still coming to light. The most recent example is the email scanner Yahoo built under the direction of the NSA and FBI.Developed in secret, the email scanner was found to be a sophisticated hacking tool, or rootkit, as some experts have classified it. The email scanner gave the U.S. government the ability to spy on millions of Yahoo Mail users without their knowledge or consent....
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Let’s put it bluntly; it sucks to be Verizon right now. Back in July, the company announced its intentions to purchase Yahoo for $4.83 billion in an effort to “enhance [its] strategy of providing a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers.” That paltry price tag was a relative bargain compared to the $50+ billion that Microsoft was rumored to offer for Yahoo earlier in the decade. However, not long after Verizon made its intentions known, it was rocked by the news that Yahoo executives sat on information that 500 million accounts had been hacked in 2014. Following these disclosures to the public, it was reported that Verizon was seeking to trim $1 billion off the purchase...
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My phone just pinged. Did someone just like the Instagram photo of my dog? Is my Chipotle to-go order finally ready? Nope, I was one of the lucky one billion users whose Yahoo account was infiltrated by hackers, my personal information potentially compromised. This past November law enforcement provided Yahoo with files that a third party claimed was Yahoo user data. Yahoo then hired an outside forensics team, and established that the data did in fact belong to their users. According to Yahoo, “Based on further analysis of this data by the forensic experts, we believe an unauthorized third party, in August 2013, stole data associated with a broader set of user accounts…” That "broader set" of...
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Yahoo can't seem to catch a break these days. At least one research firm predicts the company will report a double-digit decline in ad revenue when it reports earnings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Coupled with the negative attention Yahoo has received over a massive security breach and the revelation that it built a sophisticated email scanner for the U.S. government to spy on its users, there's increasing chatter than the Verizon deal might be off. Verizon agreed to purchase Yahoo for $4.8 billion last July, but in the time that's passed since then and now, Yahoo's taken a beating in the press, all self-inflicted. More recently, it was reported that Verizon might be seeking a...
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Yahoo has turned back on the automatic forwarding feature for Yahoo Mail users after previously disabling the function as part of what the firm claimed was planned maintenance. It's sticking with that explanation, saying the temporary disruption was part of a broader upgrade to its email service that's been taking place over the course of the year.Image Source: Flickr (Rodrigo Paoletti) "Last week, we temporarily disabled the ability to add new automatic forwarding in Yahoo Mail. As of today, auto-forward is enabled again for all Mail users," said Michael Albers, VP of Product Management, Yahoo Mail. "We apologize for the interruption.""Why the pause? Over the past year, Yahoo Mail has been upgrading...
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It's been a long time since I've read Dale Carnegie's "How to Win Friends and Influence People" but I'm pretty sure there isn't a chapter on holding people hostage. That's generally a bad idea, and so is Yahoo's decision to disable the forwarding feature for its email service, which effectively prevents Yahoo Mail users from hightailing it out of there with a note left behind for anyone that comes looking. As one Yahoo Mail user told the Associated Press, the timing here is "extremely suspicious." I don't disagree with that observation. Apparently Yahoo flipped the switch on its forward feature at the beginning of the month, and while it doesn't seem to affect users who had already set up forwarding,...
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Yahoo has recently been in the news for security breaches and invasions of user’s privacy. The company, however, has also experienced quite a bit of conflict from former employees. A recent lawsuit has accused Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, Megan Liberman (editor-in-chief of Yahoo News), and Kathy Savitt (former chief marketing officer) of purposely firing male employees due to their gender. The plaintiff is Scott Ard, now editor-in-chief of the Silicon Valley Business Journal. Ard served as head of editorial programming for Yahoo’s homepage for three and a half years. He stated that he had received “fully satisfactory” performance reviews until Liberman was hired. In June 2014, Ard was informed that...
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The security breach that rocked Yahoo two years ago could end up costing the company and its shareholders a lot of money—$1 billion, to be exact. That's the amount Verizon wants discounted from its pending acquisition of the search and media giant after agreeing to the buy Yahoo for $4.8 billion. The deal has yet to be finalized. Verizon's plan was to mesh Yahoo with AOL, the latter of it purchased a year ago for $4.4 billion. However, AOL CEO Tim Armstrong may be looking at ways to back out of the deal after it came to light that Yahoo failed to disclose the extent of its security breach in a timely manner.Image Source: Flickr (Eric Hauser)"In the last day we’ve heard that Tim is getting cold...
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In the wake of a report outing Yahoo's email scanning program for the government, a handful of other major tech firms have gone on record saying they don't snoop your incoming messages for Uncle Sam. Those firms include Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter, four of which pretty much denied ever receiving such a request from the U.S. government. "We’ve never received a request like this, and were we to receive it we’d challenge it in a court. Separately, while federal law prohibits companies from being able to share information about certain types of national security related requests, we are currently suing the Justice Department for the ability to disclose more information about government...
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Says it ain’t so, Yahoo. As if Yahoo doesn’t have enough trouble on its hands with the revelation that 500 million users accounts were compromised in a 2012 hack (that number could actually surpass 1 billion users according to recent reports), a new report suggests that Yahoo provided a helping hand to the U.S government’s spying efforts. Yahoo is accused of building a custom scanner that snooped through the email accounts of millions of unsuspecting customers. The scanner was designed and built under the direction of two of the United States’ top intelligence gathering agencies: the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) according to Reuters. The program...
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To call this a stressful time for Yahoo would be an understatement. As the company is in the process of being scooped up by Verizon, it's also dealing with the aftermath of what could become the largest security breach in all of history - at least in terms of users impacted. We reported last week that the company was slapped with a class action suit a mere day after it was discovered that upwards of 500 million user accounts were affected in a security breach. Today, an insider and former Yahoo exec claims that the real number could be double that - cue diabolical pinky finger to mouth: 1 billion (Or perhaps even higher). Yahoo's Marissa Mayer has a tough job on her hands right now This...
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Yahoo is getting ready to disclose a data breach that exposed account details for at least 200 million users. While nothing is yet official on Yahoo's part, the forthcoming disclosure is likely related to a security breach earlier this summer that Yahoo previously said it was investigating. Since then, a cybercriminal who goes by the name "Peace" has been selling the data on the dark web for $1,800.Peace, who has been linked to other high profile security breaches, claims the data includes usernames, passwords that are easy to decrypt, and personally information such as birth dates, email addresses, and more. Yahoo said back in August that it was "aware of the claim" but stopped short of confirming...
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Surprise, surprise, Yahoo has been hacked AGAIN. This time, 200 million Yahoo accounts are supposedly being shopped around for 3 bitcoins, or roughly $1,800 USD. A hacker known as Peace has listed the alleged credentials of Yahoo users on The Real Deal marketplace. He had been trading the data privately, but decided to go public on the dark web. Peace is also supposedly responsible for selling recent dumps of MySpace and LinkedIn accounts. Yahoo has yet to confirm the security breach. The company stated, “We are aware of a claim...We are committed to protecting the security of our users’ information and we take any such claim very seriously. Our security team is working to determine the facts.”...
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Yahoo has some ‘splaining to do. A judge in an appeal case for a drug trafficker recently ordered Yahoo to present a witness and provide documents explaining how the company recovers deleted emails. According to Yahoo’s policies, deleted emails are not recoverable. The appeal will decide the fate of Russell Knaggs of Yorkshire, England. In 2009 Knaggs was the ringleader for a plan to import five tons of cocaine from South America. A dealer in Colombia and one in Europe would communicate with one another through an email account “slimjim25@ymail.com”. One would write a “draft” and the other would then read it and delete it from both the “draft” and “trash” folders. Knagg’s solicitor mentioned...
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Business is good over at Verizon. So good, in fact, that the nation's largest wireless carrier announced that it's entered into a definitive agreement to purchase Yahoo for approximately $4.83 billion in cash, the company confirmed this morning. Around this time a year ago, Verizon was closing its acquisition of AOL for $4.4 billion. "Just over a year ago we acquired AOL to enhance our strategy of providing a cross-screen connection for consumers, creators and advertisers. The acquisition of Yahoo will put Verizon in a highly competitive position as a top global mobile media company, and help accelerate our revenue stream in digital advertising," said Lowell McAdam, Verizon Chairman and CEO....
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It's good computing practice to change your passwords every now and then, and also after a major hacking incident. The latter is why you should considering changing your Gmail or Yahoo password at your earliest convenience—over 272 million online accounts have been stolen and are being traded in Russia's underground market. Researchers from Hold Security told Reuters that it found a Russian hacker gloating in a web forum that he had stolen a larger number of online credentials. His cache of compromised accounts totaled 1.17 billion, though many of them were duplicates. After eliminating redundant entries, the security outfit counted 57 million Mail.ru accounts, just 7 million shy of the monthly...
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