Yahoo’s Data Breaches Seen Unlikely to Derail Verizon Deal
The second major hack of Yahoo! Inc. user accounts is unlikely to derail Verizon Communications Inc.’s $4.83 billion acquisition of the tech giant.
December 27, 2016
![Yahoo’s Data Breaches Seen Unlikely to Derail Verizon Deal Yahoo’s Data Breaches Seen Unlikely to Derail Verizon Deal](https://eu-images.contentstack.com/v3/assets/blt10e444bce2d36aa8/bltb28e80934e8cd557/652637492b1f3dcd06971816/gettyimages-yahoo2_0.jpg?width=1280&auto=webp&quality=95&format=jpg&disable=upscale)
By Bloomberg
(Bloomberg) — The second major hack of Yahoo! Inc. user accounts is unlikely to derail Verizon Communications Inc.’s $4.83 billion acquisition of the tech giant, with investors and the public becoming inured to near-daily disclosures of cyberattacks.
Hundreds of U.S. companies fall prey to hackers every year and, in many cases, the data breaches neither hurt bottom lines nor scare away customers for too long. After initial anxieties ease, everyone generally moves on. Experts say the same holds true for Yahoo and Verizon.
“I tend to not feel like these hacks are that big of a deal in the broader scheme of things,” said Michael Mahoney, senior managing director at Falcon Point Capital, which invests in wireless companies. “Obviously they can be damaging. But it doesn’t take too long before people forget about it.”
In the U.S. especially, data breaches continue to mount. Within the past few years, hackers have infiltrated Sony Corp., Target Corp., Home Depot Inc., JPMorgan Chase & Co., auction site EBay Inc. and health insurer Anthem Inc. Almost 1,000 data breaches, including Yahoo’s, occurred in the U.S. just this year, according to the Identity Theft Resource Center. And in all, more than 35 million critical personal records, including social security and passport numbers and medical and banking data, were exposed in 2016.
But Yahoo’s is one of the largest-scale data breaches reported to date. The Sunnyvale, California-based company said that cyber-thieves in 2013 siphoned information from more than 1 billion Yahoo accounts, including users’ e-mail addresses, scrambled account passwords and dates of birth, data that allow criminals to go after more sensitive personal information elsewhere online. It was the second disclosure of a major data breach since Verizon agreed to buy Yahoo. In September, the tech company revealed that more than 500 million users’ data had been hacked in a separate, state-sponsored attack in 2014.