Yahoo! CEO to Forego Bonus Amidst Latest Security Breakdown

Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer is not going to receive her annual bonus this year, as the company punishes her for failing to react quickly to a security breach in 2014. Her bonus is to be shared between staff instead.

The security breach, followed by another in 2016 involving the use of forged cookies, meant Yahoo’s sale price to Verizon had to be renegotiated, slashing millions of dollars from the original price.

The company has revealed that around 32 million user accounts were accessed used forged cookies, and while this is nothing like the 500 million accounts affected by the 2014 breach, it rocked faith in Yahoo and CEO Mayer felt it best to also pass on her stock award.

The moves were revealed in the company’s latest annual report to the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC).

The SEC filing also revealed that general counsel Ronald Bell has resigned without severance pay after an independent committee brought in to investigate the breaches concluded that the Yahoo management team failed to respond effectively to the breach discovered in 2014.

The investigation report said that although Yahoo’s security team had uncovered evidence that a hacker backed by an unnamed foreign government had breached user accounts in 2014, executives “failed to act sufficiently” and that the incident “was not properly investigated and analyzed at the time.”

“The Independent Committee found that failures in communication, management, inquiry and internal reporting contributed to the lack of proper comprehension and handling of the 2014 Security Incident,” reads the SEC filing. “The Independent Committee also found that the Audit and Finance Committee and the full board were not adequately informed of the full severity, risks, and potential impacts of the 2014 Security Incident and related matters.”

In a separate post, the company‘s CEO Marissa Mayer said she’ll forgo taking her annual bonus because the 2014 breach happened on her watch.

If you have a Yahoo! account still…you may as well shut it down. Who knows what else has been compromised from Yahoo.