Yahoo’s Last Gasp

Yahoo is going out with a bang, in keeping with its colorful history. But this last hoorah, or gasp, for Yahoo is not an enviable one and is likely to shave a significant amount off the price that Verizon ultimately pays for the company. Yahoo has been hacked, and the perpetrators have hold of millions of email addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers and encrypted passwords.

Although a hacker named “Peace” has claimed responsibility, Yahoo is alleging that this is a “state-sponsored” attack. Jeremiah Grossman, an ex-Yahoo infosec officer in the early 2000s and head of security strategy at SentinelOne, disagrees, saying that states don’t typically try to sell the stolen data, which is what happened in the Yahoo case. The sale of Yahoo to Verizon is expected to go ahead, despite the recent breach. According to B. Riley & Co. Analyst Sameet Sinha: “Data breaches have become part of doing business now,” noting that Microsoft Corp. agreed to buy LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in June, one month after LinkedIn notified users of the scope of its 2012 breach.

Here is the data:

$125 billion | Yahoo’s market cap at its highest point

$26.2 billion | The amount that Microsoft agreed to pay for LinkedIn

$4.83 billion | The price that Verizon was expected to pay for Yahoo in July

500 million | The number of accounts that were exposed during the hack

$200 million | The amount that could be shaved off the Verizon-Yahoo deal as a result of the hack, according to an analyst with SunTrust