Department of Justice (DOJ)

The fallout from the Yahoo data breaches continues to illustrate how cyberattacks thrust companies into the competing roles of crime victim, regulatory enforcement target and civil litigant.

Yahoo, which is now known as Altaba, recently became the first public company to be fined ($35 million) by the Securities and Exchange Commission for filing statements that failed to disclose known data breaches. This is on top of the $80 million federal securities class action settlement that Yahoo reached in March 2018—the first of its kind based on a cyberattack. Shareholder derivative actions remain pending in state courts, and consumer data breach class actions have survived initial motions to dismiss and remain consolidated in California for pre-trial proceedings. At the other end of the spectrum, a federal judge has balked at the U.S. Department of Justice’s (DOJ) request that a hacker-for-hire indicted in the Yahoo attacks be sentenced to eight years in prison for a digital crime spree that dates back to 2010.
Continue Reading  The Hacked & the Hacker-for-Hire: Lessons from the Yahoo Data Breaches (So Far)

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments this morning in United States v. Microsoft, No. 17-2, which presents the question whether a United States court may issue a search warrant to a U.S.-based electronic communications service for email account data held on a server outside of the United States.

Here’s the transcript of this