Verizon subsidiary Yahoo will have to face all of the lawsuits against it as a result of its handling of recently revealed data breaches, according to District Judge Lucy Koh, who denied a motion by Verizon that would have seen a large number of the claims against Yahoo, such as breach of contract and negligence, dropped outright. The most recent revelation brought to light that all 3 billion Yahoo users were affected by one of the breaches that took place in 2013. This prompted many of the plaintiffs of suits against Yahoo to amend their claims, a move that Koh backed, saying that it proved that the plaintiffs’ decisions to actually use Yahoo’s services would have been affected if they had known the full extent of the breaches beforehand.
Yahoo is facing a number of lawsuits brought by a wide range of plaintiffs consisting of just about every company that it interacted with between 2013 and 2016, during the time that the breaches were taking place. Verizon had moved to dismiss many of the claims against Yahoo in order to pare down the number of lawsuits it would have to contend with, and now that the motion has been denied, proceedings against Yahoo are quite likely to become more active in the coming months. New lawsuits could potentially surface. On that note, this ruling had a knock-on effect of essentially greenlighting a massive class-action lawsuit against Yahoo with hundreds of millions of plaintiffs worldwide, spearheaded by specialist John Yanchunis and famous Florida law firm Morgan & Morgan.
For the uninitiated, Yahoo hid a large number of massive data breaches over the years, and they did not come to light until the company was being reviewed for a buyout by wireless carrier Verizon. As noted above, these large-scale breaches happened over the course of multiple years, and eventually resulted in the data of Yahoo’s entire user base being compromised, resulting in possible loss of personal data for the entire 3 billion strong group. Some of the breaches were apparently the work of state-sponsored Russian hackers. The company stands accused by multiple parties of not only negligence, but malicious intent in keeping the breaches a secret for so long.