The Yahoo! Breach Settlement and a Good Podcast

As you probably have seen in the headlines over the past few days, Yahoo! has agreed to pay $50 million (USD) to settle claims relating to the largest-scale corporate data security breach in history.

Here are the key terms: 

• Although the incident involved as many as three billion accounts, the settlement will cover only about one billion accounts held by approximately 200 million accountholders in the U.S. and Israel.
• If you held a Yahoo! free account from 2012 to 2016, you can apply for a very modest share of the settlement funds, up to around $375, according to the press, but if you had a premium account, you will also be entitled to a small refund. 
• Affected individuals in the  U.S. will get credit monitoring services for two years via AllClear.
• The settlement funds will be paid by both Oath/Verizon and Altaba, which bought parts of Yahoo! following the breach.  

 Oh--and the plaintiffs' counsel will get $35 million. 

Altaba has already settled three cases related to the breach, according to information revealed in September.

If you are interested in the human story behind the incident and the Verizon purchase that was signed five days before the breach was revealed, I recommend this excellent podcast from Carbonite's Breach podcast, hosted by award-winning cybersecurity journalist Bob Sullivan and veteran podcast producer Alia Tavakolian: https://www.carbonite.com/blog/article/2018/03/new-podcast-investigates-massive-yahoo-data-breach/