Yahoo Renames Itself as ‘Altaba’, CEO Marissa Mayer Resigns

Yahoo as we are aware of it is now not. no longer best has CEO Marissa Mayer resigned, however TechCrunch experiences the rest board individuals have chosen to rename the company as Altaba Inc.

A filing with the Securities and alternate commission confirms the identify alternate, which TechCrunch states is a sign that the company’s sale to Verizon is moving forward as deliberate.

Verizon is about to obtain nearly all of Yahoo’s belongings following the sale, while Altaba Inc. will hold a 15% stake in Alibaba and a 35.5% stake in Yahoo Japan.

that suggests Yahoo’s search engine, blogs, email service, and other properties contained on the homepage will proceed to operate beneath Verizon. They’re not going anywhere in the meanwhile. Altaba is essentially selecting up what’s left behind after the Verizon sale.

The Altaba board now consists of most effective 5 members: Tor Braham, Eric Brandt, Catherine Friedman, Thomas McInerney and Jeffrey Smith. Altaba is now only a retaining company, which owns nothing greater than inventory and patents.

The Yahoo brand we’ve at all times recognized may very neatly proceed to survive below Verizon. Former CEO Marissa Mayer can result in a task with Verizon as smartly, however her future plans have but to be introduced.

people who use Yahoo’s web products and services aren't prone to notice any alternate if and when the sale to Verizon closes. There’s still an opportunity the deal gained’t even go through, during which case all of the above will also be pushed aside. Yahoo not too long ago disclosed details of two vital hacks, which analysts speculate may put the handle Verizon in jeopardy.

this is all the data that's available at the moment. more small print are anticipated to be published later this month all through Yahoo’s salary call.

Yahoo Under Scrutiny After Latest Hack, Verizon Seeks New Deal Terms

Yahoo Inc came under renewed scrutiny by federal investigators and lawmakers on Thursday after disclosing the largest known data breach in history, prompting Verizon Communications Inc to demand better terms for its planned purchase of Yahoo's Internet business.

Shares of the Sunnyvale, California-based internet pioneer fell more than 6 percent after it announced the breach of data belonging to more than 1 billion users late on Wednesday, following another large hack reported in September.

Verizon, which agreed to buy Yahoo's core Internet business in July for $4.8 billion, is now trying to persuade Yahoo to amend the terms of the acquisition agreement to reflect the economic damage from the two hacks, according to people familiar with the matter.

The US No. 1 wireless carrier still expects to go through with the deal, but is looking for "major concessions" in light of the most recent breach, according to another person familiar with the situation.
Asked about the status of the deal, a Yahoo spokesperson said: "We are confident in Yahoo's value and we continue to work towards integration with Verizon."

Verizon had already said in October it was reviewing the deal after September's breach disclosure. Late on Wednesday, it said it would "review the impact of this new development before reaching any final conclusions" about whether to proceed.

The company declined to comment beyond that statement on Thursday.

Verizon has threatened to go to court to get out of the deal if it is not repriced, citing a material adverse effect, said the people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because the negotiations are confidential.

No court in Delaware, where Yahoo is incorporated, has ever found that a material adverse effect has occurred that would allow companies to terminate a merger agreement.

Nevertheless, the threat of a court case on the issue has been successfully used by companies to renegotiate deals, and experts said that some concessions from Yahoo are likely, given the magnitude of the cyber-security breaches.

Renegotiating the deal's price tag would be the simplest but also least likely scenario because the impact of the data breaches will not be apparent for some time, according to Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business.

A more likely concession would be for Yahoo to agree to compensate Verizon after the close of the deal, based on the liabilities that occur. The two companies may also agree to extend the close of the deal to allow for more time for information to come in on the impact of the breaches, Gordon suggested.

Verizon shares rose 0.4 percent to close at $51.81, in line with the S&P 500 Index. Yahoo closed down 6.1 percent at $38.41.

Biggest breach
Yahoo said late on Wednesday that it had uncovered a 2013 cyber-attack that compromised data of more than 1 billion user accounts, the largest known breach on record.

It said the data stolen may have included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.

The company added that some of its partners were affected. One such partner, Europe's Sky Plc, said Yahoo provides email services to its 2.1 million Sky.com email account holders, but it was unclear how many of those accounts were affected.

The announcement followed Yahoo's disclosure in September of a separate breach that affected over 500 million accounts, which the company said it believed was launched by different hackers.

The White House said on Thursday the US Federal Bureau of Investigation was probing the breach. Several lawsuits seeking class-action status on behalf of Yahoo shareholders have been filed, or are in the works.

Meanwhile, Democratic Senator Mark Warner of Virginia said he was looking into Yahoo's cyber-security practices.

"This most-recent revelation warrants a separate follow-up and I plan to press the company on why its cyber defences have been so weak as to have compromised over a billion users," he said in a statement.

Warner, who will become the top Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee next year, described the hacks as "deeply troubling."

New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman urged anyone with a Yahoo account to change their passwords and security questions and said he is examining the breach's circumstances and the company's disclosures to law enforcement.

Germany's cyber-security authority, the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), advised German consumers to consider switching to safer alternatives for email, and criticized Yahoo for failing to adopt modern encryption techniques to protect users' personal data.

"Considering the repeated cases of data theft, users should look more closely at which services they want to use in the future and security should play a part in that decision," BSI President Arne Schoenbohm said in a statement.

The latest breach drew widespread criticism from security experts, several advising consumers to close their Yahoo accounts.

"Yahoo has fallen down on security in so many ways I have to recommend that if you have an active Yahoo email account, either direct with Yahoo of via a partner like AT&T, get rid of it," Stu Sjouwerman, chief executive of cyber security firm KnowBe4 Inc, said in a broadly distributed email.

A Yahoo spokesperson, in response to criticism of the company's security measures, said on Thursday: "We're committed to keeping our users secure, both by continuously striving to stay ahead of ever-evolving online threats and to keep our users and platforms secure."

+Web Solution, Web Design and development Company, India 

Yahoo Hack: information on some 500 million people were stolen

Yahoo hack analysis shows little evidence of foreign involvement

Last week, Yahoo owned up to the largest hack known to have occurred in computing history. Passwords, logins, and other account information on some 500 million people were stolen in the heist. At the time, Yahoo claimed that the hack was the work of state-sponsored actors — but independent analysts working on analyzing the hack have begun pushing back that assessment, while current and former Yahoo employees say security was a distant priority at Yahoo.

InfoArmor has published a timeline and history of the attack against Yahoo. The first offers to sell Yahoo-derived data appeared on April 3, 2016. According to InfoArmor’s analysis, the individuals attempting to sell the Yahoo data (and other major data sets for websites like Instagram, LinkedIn, Dropbox, MySpace, and Tumblr) are fronting the data sets for criminal groups, as opposed to acting directly on behalf of government agencies in foreign countries. It’s not always easy to tease these relationships apart, since criminal hackers sometimes sell data to nation-states, or could be hired to work directly on their behalf.

The graphic below shows the proposed relationships between a set of professional, Eastern European black hats in green, English-speaking threat actors (in red), and a potential group of state-sponsored actors who purchase data from the digital fences but weren’t directly involved in the hack itself (purple).

YahooPIC8

It’s generally considered difficult to prove that any single government was responsible for a hack. But these attacks tend to be extremely sophisticated, with carefully crafted malware that goes after specific targets. If conventional malware attacks are WW2-era carpet bombing, targeted, state-sponsored malware are modern, self-guided ‘smart’ weapons with precision strike capabilities and advanced munitions. The InfoArmor analysis also revealed the scope of what was taken from Yahoo: login ids, country codes, recovery emails, date-of-birth records, MD5 password hashes, cell phone numbers, and zip codes were all stolen.

Yahoo: Too terrified of losing users to protect them
An investigation by the New York Times doesn’t paint a flattering picture of Yahoo’s security infrastructure. While Yahoo created a dedicated security team after high-profile attacks took down other services, it rarely listened to its own experts, dubbed the “Paranoids” internally. Yahoo didn’t implement a bug bounty program until 2013, three years after Google debuted its own. In 2013, the Snowden leaks demonstrated Yahoo was a frequent target of hack attempts, but it took the company a full year to even hire a chief information security officer.

Yahoo’s security team pushed for end-to-end encryption for all Yahoo products. They were shut down by protests from the senior VP overseeing email and messaging services, Jeff Bonforte, who claimed end-to-end encryption would limit Yahoo’s ability to search and index email or offer new services to customers. When Yahoo’s new chief security officer went to bat for user privacy and security, he found little support from CEO Marissa Mayer. The Paranoids were starved for resources, and their suggestions for improving security through superior intrusion detection were denied as well, according to the report. Even a request to automatically reset passwords for all users in the wake of a major breach was denied.

Why? Money and reach. Mayer and other executives were concerned that any disruption to service — even something as simple as a password reset — could trigger more users to leave the company and seek service elsewhere. Yahoo notified its customers that a hack had occurred, but took no other action to protect its customers. Between the lack of evidence for state-sponsored activity, and growing awareness that the company’s lack of concern for security played a significant role in its own downfall, Yahoo is looking like a worse acquisition for Verizon all the time.

Yahoo management could have used the Snowden leaks to justify a new round of spending and consumer-centric, privacy-friendly changes. After all, it was thanks to Snowden that we found out Yahoo had challenged the government’s right to spy on its customers in multiple secret court battles. Yahoo could have built on that record and appealed to more customers in the process. Instead, it refused to implement best practices because it was afraid of losing market share at an even faster rate.

Reffred: extremetech.com