Marissa Mayer Loses Bonus in Wake of Hack -
By VINDU GOELMARCH 1, 2017
SAN FRANCISCO — Yahoo’s top lawyer, Ronald S. Bell, resigned Wednesday,
and its chief executive, Marissa Mayer, lost her 2016 bonus after a board investigation of the 2014 theft of information on more than 500 million user accounts.
Senior executives, company lawyers and information security staff were aware of the hack in 2014 and also knew about subsequent attempts to break into the affected accounts in 2015 and 2016,
but failed to “properly comprehend or investigate” the situation, the company’s board of directors said in a securities filing on Wednesday.
The board “did not conclude that there was an intentional suppression of relevant information.”
Those hackers, which Yahoo believes were connected to a foreign government, used the stolen information to forge a type of software called a cookie
that could be used to access 32 million Yahoo accounts, the company said.
Under Ms. Mayer’s employment agreement, her annual target bonus is $2 million a year
and her annual stock award is supposed to be no less than $12 million a year.
That theft — which was discovered last year by an outside security expert who noticed the information for sale on the black market — was so serious
that Yahoo forced all affected users to reset their passwords.
The board offered no new information about the company’s apparent failure to notice
a separate theft in 2013 of the account information of one billion users.
