Marissa Mayer to forfeit millions in bonus, stocks over security lapses

Yahoo chief executive Marissa Mayer and the company's top lawyer will pay for the security breaches at the company that exposed the personal information of over 1 billion users.

While Mayer would lose her annual bonus worth $2 million, Yahoo general counsel and comp-any secretary Ronald Bell had resigned without severance pay for his department's poor response to the hack attack.

In addition to the bonus loss, Mayer would also forgo an annual stock award worth millions of dollars.

The penal action stems from an internal review that found Mayer's management team had been slow to react to one breach in 2014. Mayer said yesterday that she would like the board to distribute her bonus to Yahoo's entire workforce of 8,500 employees. The board had made no comment on her suggestion.

Yahoo failed to disclose the 2014 breach until last September when it finally acted and notified 500 million users that their email addresses, birth dates, answers to security questions, and other personal information might have been stolen. Three months later, the company announced it had uncovered a separate hack in 2013 that had hit 1 billion accounts, including some that were also hit in 2014 (See: Yahoo 2014 hack much worse than expected).

The breaches exacted a major toll, with the company lowering the sales price of its email and other digital services to Verizon Communications from $4.83 billion to $4.48 billion to account for the potential backlash from the breaches.

Bell resigned following the  observations of a committee, which had probed the lapses. The committee noted that the ''the relevant legal team had sufficient information to warrant substantial further inquiry in 2014, and they did not sufficiently pursue it.''

Mayer said in a statement, "As those who follow Yahoo know, in late 2014, we were the victim of a state-sponsored attack and reported it to law enforcement as well as to the 26 users that we understood were impacted.

"When I learned in September 2016 that a large number of our user database files had been stolen, I worked with the team to disclose the incident to users, regulators, and government agencies.

"However, 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.