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Yahoo Sued For Gross Negligence Over Huge Hacking (reuters.com)
Yahoo apparently took two years to investigate and tell people that its service had been breached, and that over 500 million users were affected. Amid the announcement, a user is suing Yahoo, accusing the company of gross negligence. From a Reuters report: The lawsuit was filed in the federal court in San Jose, California, one day after Yahoo disclosed the hacking, unprecedented in size, by what it believed was a "state-sponsored actor." Ronald Schwartz, a New York resident, sued on behalf of all Yahoo users in the United States whose personal information was compromised. The lawsuit seeks class-action status and unspecified damages. A Yahoo spokeswoman said the Sunnyvale, California-based company does not discuss pending litigation. The attack could complicate Chief Executive Marissa Mayer's effort to shore up the website's flagging fortunes, two months after she agreed to a $4.8 billion sale of Yahoo's Internet business to Verizon Communications. Yahoo on Thursday said user information including names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates and encrypted passwords had been compromised in late 2014.
Wasn't Slashdot only a number of articles ago talking about how much cheaper it is to get hacked than to deploy proper security and maintenance?
We've known this for ages....and I learnt about it the hard way years ago as a webmaster.
In my junior sysadmin pre-ITIL cowboy days, I was tasked with managing a web server, and it turned out that PHP needed an immediate update.
Without further ado, to avoid the risk of getting hacked, I went and updated PHP to the next version up.
Turns out that doing so broke a number of customer webpages - which were reliant on some old broken and unmaintained code. The website owners then complained and whined to our company that we threatened their businesses. (Fortunately they only made peanuts to our bottom-line, so luckily we didn't care that much)
Lesson was simple: it is much easier to maintain old versions that keep things working AND DO NOTHING than to do any proactive security maintenance. This works in a number of ways.
Firstly, when you eventually get hacked IT IS NOT YOUR FAULT. It is the fault of some hacker and things will be seen that way. Blame gets shifted away from the admins anyhow.
Secondly, doing nothing is CHEAPER. It involves less risk, less change, and less responsibility. In a world where shareholders, finance and management dictate the aims of IT - you may as well fire the sysadmins because it's risky if they do any maintenance, meaning that since they're not going to do anything you may as well fire them. Just get contractors to build things to work once, then leave the systems on the internet indefinitely until they either end up getting hacked to the point of failure, or the hardware breaks down. Then rebuild the system from scratch with more contractors when that time eventuates.
That's how security patching works in the real world. In other words, it doesn't.
The thing is, it's ALL ABOUT SHIFTING BLAME in the world of IT, and IT is a risk, and it is expensive.
That's why there is so much outsourcing combined with support contracts so company managers can point the finger at vendors when things go to hell and then walk away with legal indemnification and still keep their job and their pensions while saying that they kept costs down when things eventually go to pot.
So in this Yahoo case, someone finally has to guts to call Yahoo out on it.
READY.
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I join you in your moral outrage, but... does the law (US law or otherwise) even have a provision for such negligence? Also, what is it we want to see punished? Lax security? That sounds fine until you realise every guy with a message board will be on the hook as well: not everyone is a security expert (or even a half decent webadmin), and certainly not everyone can afford to hire one.
What I certainly would like to see punished is the very very late disclosure of the breach. Starting this year, companies in the Netherlands are obliged to disclose data breaches. Fines for non compliance go up to €500k for simple cases; for more serious cases the fine is capped at 10% of net yearly turnover. It's a start... the law applies only if sensitive information was leaked such as names, dates of birth, addresses, medical info, etc. It doesn't cover username / password. Also, the company discloses the breach to the authorities, not their customers; the authorities may force the company to inform their customers as well though.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
"When you're this negligent with your security, a simple class action lawsuit for damages won't suffice. "
Take a good look at the Lawyers involved...
They don't take on trivial cases.
They win.
They get huge settlements.
And don't think for a minute that "Ronald Schwartz" just waltzed into the Law Offices with a grudge. There will be other suits filed all over the country Very Soon Now, by other "Chosen" Plaintiffs, just to get this all rolled into one Big Hairy Juicy Class Action Law Suit. Possibly the biggest, ever.
Of course, even Lawyers have to eat, and this will take years, maybe a decade, unless Yahoo or whatever quickly stripped carcass of Yahoo is left, caves. But still, there is Big Money behind this. Just Whose is the question.
"I despise the Russian hackers, who deserve to be on the receiving end of vigilante justice."
I like the way that you phrased this, because the hands-off Wild West metaphor for the Internet has gone too far. When Law failed in the Wild West, Vigilance Committees formed and hung a few self-made bastards. (And note that subsequently, a few members of these Committees were hung themselves... These things do tend to get out of hand.)
"Yes, that includes Marissa Mayer, who needs to be behind bars for the awful way her company handled the breach"
The Wild West metaphor applies to Mayer as well. She should stop thinking about redesigning Logos, and start thinking about full-time heavily-armed Security for Herself, her Family, and her Associates, for the foreseeable future.
People, a lot of them, and this includes Stockholders, are getting very angry at Corporate America. Both Trump and Clinton are channeling this, which is actually dangerous for both of them given their past. That Corporate America has allied itself to the Criminal World, and I'm looking at you, ISPs and the entire Advertising Industry specifically, and Big Pharma, Big Finance, and the Entertainment Industry in general, means that there is little room any longer for subtleties; at some point something snaps, and it comes time to just simply hang them all, and then throw the Nations largest Block Party ever, and have some Barbeque.
Then again, I was never much good at Prophecy; if I was, I'd have a bigger Yacht...