Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 24: Delane Parnell

Jamarlin talks to prodigy Delane Parnell, founder and CEO of high-school esports company PlayVS, which just raised a $15M series A round.

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Think back. Do you remember the August 2013 data breach of Yahoo? Well, if you were affected by it, you may be owed some money–up to $375. People who had a Yahoo email account between 2012 and 2016, may be eligible for the money under a $50-million settlement. Yahoo’s new owners Verizon and Altbaba agreed to pay the settlement.

“Hackers–some linked to Russia–compromised all three billion Yahoo accounts in 2013 and 2014, but the company didn’t disclose the breach until 2016, a delay for which it has already been fined $35 million by the Securities and Exchange Commission. This new settlement is the result of a two-year-old lawsuit covering approximately 200 million people in the U.S. and Israel whose information was stolen,” Inc. reported.

A federal judge in San Jose still needs to sign off on the settlement before it is finalized.  On November 29 a hearing in California will be held to approve this proposed end to the two-year lawsuit. If approved, the affected account holders will be emailed and notices will also be published in People and National Geographic, the Associated Press reported.

 

Yahoo email account holders can receive $25 an hour for their time spent trying to deal with issues they were caused by the security breach up to a maximum of 15 hours, or $375–but you will need documentation on how that time was spent. If you don’t have documents, you can still claim up to 5 hours, or $125. And, premium account holders can receive a 25 percent refund. Additionally, all account holders will also receive two years of credit monitoring from AllClear.

Since buying Yahoo, which had to lower its purchase price by $350 million after news of the breach, Verizon has folded Yahoo and some AOL assets under the name Oath. Under the buyout deal, Yahoo’s stake in Alibaba and Yahoo Japan went to the newly formed Altbaba, which also inherited Yahoo’s cash and thus liability for shareholder lawsuits.

While this settlement deals with the 2013 breach, Yahoo had a much more drastic breach in 2014–considered the second-biggest known breach of all time, in terms of impacted users. That breach, which was not disclosed until September 2016, impacted 500 million accounts.