Editor’s Morning Note: Sometimes you get to learn a lesson by watching someone else fall into the mud puddle.
This is as close to a shitstorm as we could for publication. I give you: mudstorm.
A quick hit this morning that applies to companies large and small. The lesson is simple: Cybersecurity issues can whittle the valuation of your company from large to modest to minute.
As you must have read yesterday, Yahoo suffered a massive data breach in 2013. No, not that massive hack. A new massive hack.
For flavor, this is what the tech press does to you when you make a mistake large enough that some readers will wonder if the story is off by an order of magnitude:
That is an, ahem, mudstorm, for Yahoo.
Verizon, which is in the process of buying much of Yahoo’s core business, now wants a discount. That looks like this:
Ouch.
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Cybersecurity is not a second-tier issue; it’s not a cost you can defer. It is not something you can claim and not have. And the bigger your company gets and the more it’s worth, the larger the target on your back becomes.
Poor Yahoo. Learn from their lesson. If Verizon aborts Yahoo’s assumption, or manages to immiserate the portal’s shareholders through a firesale, it won’t be purely capitalistic avarice. Yahoo brought this upon itself.