14 DAY TRIAL // Similar to other cases in which major companies have failed to protect their customers’ details, Yahoo! is also facing a lawsuit. The court action is a result of the data breach in which around 450,000 usernames and passwords have been exposed.
Jeff Allan has filed a complaint at the California Northern District Court, accusing the company of negligence. The decision comes after the plaintiff discovered that someone had accessed his eBay account with a set of credentials that showed up in the Yahoo! Voices data leak, Bloomberg reports.
“We confirm that an older file from Yahoo! Contributor Network (previously Associated Content) containing approximately 450,000 Yahoo! and other company users names and passwords was compromised yesterday, July 11. Of these, less than 5% of the Yahoo! accounts had valid passwords,” the company stated at the time.
However, they didn’t consider the fact that many of the username and password combinations were utilized by the affected individuals on other sites as well.
Since the hackers made the large amount of information available to anyone, the chances for the credentials to be misused, even by unskilled cybercriminals, were high.
Yahoo! may have attempted to downplay the effects of the incident, but as experts have highlighted, the situation may be more critical than the firm leads us to believe.
The organization claims to have enhanced its security after the breach and numerous security advisories have been published to warn potential victims of the threats.
However, in such scenarios, a lawsuit is difficult to avoid, especially if we consider the fact that a large firm is involved and some damage has already been caused.
In this case, the judge - Howard R. Lloyd - can decide to hold Yahoo! responsible for failing to protect its customers, or he can rule in favor of the firm if he finds that the plaintiff has failed to follow best security practices.