Verizon on Thursday said that it was leaning toward declaring as a “material” event the massive data breach disclosed three weeks ago by Yahoo, a determination that could jeopardize Verizon’s deal to purchase the tech firm’s core business.
“I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that impact is material,” Verizon General Counsel Craig Silliman told a small group of reporters. “And we’re looking to Yahoo to demonstrate to us the full impact if they believe it’s not. They’ll need to show us that, but the process is in the works.”
The revelation comes as the FBI has determined that Russian government hackers are behind the breach, considered perhaps the largest in history, which Yahoo said it discovered over the summer. The breach, Yahoo said, occurred in 2014, and affected at least 500 million user accounts. The Web giant said that the breach was conducted by “state-sponsored” hackers.
But the state-sponsored nature of the hack does not affect the analysis of materiality, Sillliman said.
“From a legal perspective,” he said, “the question … is whether this had a material or an adverse effect on the asset we are buying.”
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