Yahoo Chief Executive Officer Marissa Mayer has agreed to forgo her annual bonus and this year’s equity grant to compensate the company’s failure to handle an incident of security breach in 2014. Mayer has asked the company’s board to distribute her bonus among the “hardworking employees”.
Mayer’s cash bonus is worth about $2 million (Rs 13 crore approximately) annually, reported AP. “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,” Mayer said in a statement. She had assumed the office of the Yahoo CEO in 2012.
Besides, General Counsel Ronald Bell also resigned from Yahoo after investigations showed that the company’s legal cell acted too slowly to reports of hacking. Bell has also forgone his severance pay.
According to a a regulatory filing by the company on Wednesday, the independent committee that investigated the 2014 incident said that Yahoo’s security team was aware when users’ accounts were being hacked. However, the report did not identify the executives responsible for the whole episode.
In September last year, Yahoo had confirmed that account information of an estimated 500 million users was stolen from the company’s network in late 2014. The information stolen included names, email addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, passwords, security questions and answers in some cases. However, the investigation had confirmed that no details of payment card data or banking-related information were stolen.
Apart from the 2014 security breach incident, there was another similar episode in 2013 when accounts of 1 billion of its users had been hacked. More than 40 lawsuits had been filed to demand damages for the breaches.
All of this come at a time when Yahoo is about to close its $4.8-billion (approximately Rs 32,000 crore) deal with Verizon. The United States-based telecom major is set to buy out Yahoo’s real estate holdings, while Yahoo would keep its stakes in Alibaba Group Holding Ltd, Yahoo Japan Corp, as well as some patents, which are worth $40 billion (Rs 2.6 lakh crore approximately) in total.
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