SEC is looking into why Yahoo had taken so long to disclose it experienced two massive security breaches. The tech company has apparently been hacked twice in the last five years alone.
Yahoo's security breaches. According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, the company is being examined by the Security and Exchange Commission (SEC) whether it should have informed investors sooner about two massive hacks it had experienced.
The tech firm was the target of a cyber attack in 2014 which it had announced in September 2016. That attack exposed email credentials and other data of over half a billion users. Just in December last year, the company announced that it had experienced an earlier cyber attack compromising over one billion user accounts in August of 2013.
The company apparently knew of some employees who were aware of the attacks as far back as 2014. However, Yahoo waited years before disclosing the details of the breaches to its investors which is what the SEC is investigating and had requested documents from the company for.
Yahoo was called on by Senator Mark Warner to look into the breaches back in September. Senator Warner is a co-founder of Nextel and a former startup investor.
This isn't the first time that the SEC has investigated companies for disclosing hacks at a later date. It had conducted a probe on Target between 2013 and 2014 which experienced an attack compromising credit card details of millions of customers. The SEC ultimately did not find any misdoings on Target's side.
The tech company is currently being acquired by Verizon. The disclosure of the hacks came after it agreed to sell its business to the telecoms company. Other government agencies looking into hacks along with the SEC are the US Attorney's Office of Manhattan, Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and a number of State Attorneys General.
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