On April 24, 2018 the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) announced a settlement with Altaba, Inc., formerly Yahoo! Inc., for misleading investors by failing to disclose a data breach in which Russian hackers stole data for hundreds of millions of Yahoo accounts.  This settlement and penalty, the first by the SEC following a data breach, comes in the wake of recent SEC guidance on cybersecurity risks and disclosures.

On March 14, 2018, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) and Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) announced parallel criminal and civil charges against Jun Ying, the former Chief Information Officer of Equifax’s United States Information Systems, for selling his shares of Equifax stock before Equifax publicly announced that it had suffered an immense data breach.  These charges come in the wake of recent SEC guidance on ensuring corporate insiders do not trade in securities while in possession of material nonpublic information about cybersecurity incidents.