Dems slam Yahoo CEO over delay in acknowledging hack

Six Democratic senators are blasting Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer, saying the delay in reporting a high-profile security breach is “unacceptable.”

“We are even more disturbed that user information was first compromised in 2014, yet the company only announced the breach last week,” Sens. Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Al Franken (Minn.), Elizabeth Warren (Mass.), Richard Blumenthal (Conn.), Ron Wyden (Ore.) and Edward J. Markey (Mass.) wrote in a letter to Mayer on Tuesday.

{mosads}“This is unacceptable,” they added.  

Yahoo last week acknowledged that 500 million accounts were compromised.  

The senators have six questions for Mayer, including when Yahoo first learned of the compromise, how many users were affected, what protections Yahoo is offering to them and what steps Yahoo is taking to prevent such breaches in the future.

The senators also want to know if the U.S. government had warned Yahoo of a possible state-sponsored hack. In a press release last week, the company said it believed that was behind the breach.

The six Democrats join Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.) in his criticism of Yahoo in the wake of the hack. Warner urged congressional action to establish a system to notify users of future breaches.

Warner and Blumenthal have also called for probes of Yahoo to investigate to potential regulation violations.