U.S. Officials Plan to Unveil Charges Tied to Yahoo Hack
March 14 2017 - 11:45PM
Dow Jones News
By Deepa Seetharaman and Aruna Viswanatha
U.S. officials are planning to unveil charges Wednesday related
to the theft of personal data that affected hundreds of millions of
Yahoo Inc. users and disrupted the company's sale to Verizon
Communications Inc., according to people familiar with the
matter.
At least some of the alleged hackers have ties to the Russian
government, said the people, who added the national security
division of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation plan to announce the charges Wednesday morning.
In September, Yahoo revealed hackers penetrated its network in
late 2014 and stole personal data on more than 500 million users.
The company concluded that it had been breached by "a
state-sponsored actor." The 2014 incident was separate from another
much larger theft, affecting more than a billion accounts, that
Yahoo disclosed in December and that dated back to 2013.
It is unclear if the charges are related to one or both of the
breaches. The Russian Embassy in Washington didn't immediately
return a request for comment.
Earlier Tuesday, Bloomberg reported the Justice Department plans
to accuse four people of participating in the security breaches,
including one person in Canada and three people in Russia.
The series of hacks tarnished the reputation of the struggling
Silicon Valley internet company and forced Yahoo back to the
negotiating table with Verizon, which reached a deal to buy Yahoo
last July, two months before the 2014 hack was disclosed.
Last month, Verizon reduced the acquisition price to roughly
$4.5 billion, a $350 million price-cut. The deal is expected to
close by the end of June.
Earlier this month, Yahoo's top lawyer, Ronald Bell, resigned
after a board investigation found that senior executives at the
company failed to "properly comprehend or investigate" the 2014
security breach. Yahoo's board also decided not to award Chief
Executive Marissa Mayer her 2016 cash bonus, and accepted her offer
to forgo her 2017 equity awards.
It remains unclear why Yahoo waited for nearly two years to
disclose the 2014 incident, and federal authorities, including the
Securities and Exchange Commission, are investigating the company's
slow response.
Yahoo's board blamed "failures in communication, management,
inquiry and internal reporting" and a "lack of proper comprehension
and handling," the company said in an SEC filing earlier this
month.
--Robert McMillan contributed to this article.
Write to Deepa Seetharaman at Deepa.Seetharaman@wsj.com and
Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 14, 2017 23:30 ET (03:30 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2017 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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