How Much Could a Cybersecurity Lapse Cost? $350M for Yahoo!

The Yahoo! data breach has toppled the company’s position in the market and Verizon is questioning its bid to take over the mailing giant. Verizon had agreed to pay $4.8 billion to acquire Yahoo; however, with the latest breach, Verizon is questioning the very thought of the acquisition. During the breach, more than one billion user accounts are compromised, which has put everything into question.
Given the nature of the violation, Verizon wants to cut the acquisition price from $4.8 billion. They are currently looking at significant reductions in the deal price since the very essence of integrity and security has been brought to the fore. On the other hand, Yahoo seems to be unfazed with the latest cyber attack, and it seems quite confident of being able to sail through the acquisition deal without any hiccups.
Verizon is under a lot of pressure from its stakeholders’ to reevaluate if this deal is still profitable as it was at the time of negotiations. To better gauge the damage and understand the feasibility of the deal, Verizon’s legal team is assessing every angle of the security breach, to understand the next steps. This way, the acquiring company will be in a better position to know if the deal should be called off, or continued as planned. If everything goes as per plan, then the deal will be finalised in this quarter.

Yahoo’s shares, which were steadily trading above $40, have seen ups and downs ever since the details of the breach got out. This is not the only problem which has surfaced over the years. The main issue with Yahoo is that it is taking years and years to uncover the series of breaches. This means that there might be some more breaches, which the world is not aware of. Unfortunately, such violations involve a site which was once a go-to site for daily news, search engine matches and of course, a mailing giant. With such involvement in the open, there is a lot at stake, when it comes to measuring the security of the company’s sensitive data.
Talking about breaches, Yahoo is not the only one with a security breach. Since breaches are a common thing in the world of technology, is it hard to overlook the concept of DDoS, or Denial of Service Attacks. Cybercrime is a big deterrent; service interruptions from DDoS itself has surged the cybercrime numbers to 162%. Yahoo was one of the parties affected in 2016, while there was a compromise of 412 million accounts on Adult Friend Finder, a social network.
The question which is plaguing everyone’s minds these days is, “Will Verizon still be interested in buying Yahoo?” As per the Wall Street analysts, there does not seem to be a dent in the plans of Verizon, since the company wants to add Yahoo to its fleets of conquests. With this thought in mind, the main idea is to see how much Yahoo will eventually cost Verizon and what will it take to finalise the deal for the acquisition.
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Securities Disclosure: I, Prashant Sharma, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
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