Yahoo already hit with lawsuits over hack
Yahoo users are fighting back after what's being called the biggest data breach in history.
Yahoo faces class action lawsuits after disclosing a massive data breach Thursday.
The problems keep mounting for Yahoo.
The internet giant is getting hit with lawsuits, a day after it disclosed a massive hack in which at least 500 million user accounts were swiped.
The hack exposed users' names, email addresses, phone numbers, birth dates, encrypted passwords and, in some cases, security questions and answers, Yahoo said in a press release. It took place in 2014 and is being called the biggest data breach in history.
On Friday, the firms Robbins Geller Rudman & Dowd and Labaton Sucharow filed a suit in the US District Court in the Northern District of California. The suit, for which the firm intends to seek class action status, accuses Yahoo of "failure to establish and implement basic data security" and being "grossly negligent" with user data, according to the complaint. It also alleges the company knew of the breach "long before" it was disclosed, but hid it from the public until after its $4.83 billion sale to Verizon.
"Yahoo's failure to safeguard its users' very personal, sensitive information, in direct violation of its promises, is utterly unacceptable in this day and age," attorneys from both firms wrote in a statement. "The fact that a breach of this magnitude went undetected at a tech giant like Yahoo for two years is astounding."
A separate class action suit was filed Thursday in US District Court in San Diego, according to the San Jose Mercury News. In that case, plaintiffs came to the lawyer before Yahoo announced the hack, trying to figure out how people were accessing their information.
The attorney on the San Diego case, David Casey, told the Mercury News he expected many other lawsuits to be filed against Yahoo over the breach, and he anticipated they'd all be rolled into one class action suit.
Yahoo declined to comment on "ongoing litigation."