In July, U.S. telecommunications giant Verizon had planned to buy Yahoo for $4.83 billion. This acquisition mainly involves Yahoo's search engine, online advertising tools, Internet services and other Internet businesses and real estate and other core assets. After the deal is completed, Verizon will receive 1 billion monthly Yahoo mail, news, sports content and financial tools, as well as mobile technologies for fast-growing mobile applications, video and handheld devices.
Yahoo will retain its stake in Alibaba and its Yahoo Japan assets, with a total market value of approximately US$40 billion. After the completion of the transaction, Yahoo will also be renamed and become a listed investment company, operating Asian equity assets, ending its 20-year career as an independent Internet operator.
After the acquisition is completed, Yahoo will merge with AOL’s AOL business acquired by Verizon last year. Through this acquisition, AOL will increase digital media and advertising business, provide personalized advertising for mobile network users, and thus compete with giants such as Google and Facebook in the advertising business. However, the acquisition has not yet been officially completed, and Yahoo spoke repeatedly about the scandal.
Not long ago, Yahoo! announced that it had stolen at least 500 million user account information, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, birthdays, passwords, and in some cases even encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers. At least 500 million users will be the largest information leak in history.
According to inside sources, this information leakage event originated from a cyber attack at the end of 2014, but Yahoo did not put enough emphasis on security issues internally, resulting in slow investment in security systems. When she was Yahoo CEO in mid-2012, security was one of the important issues that Marisa Meyer needed to face, but because there were many issues that needed to be addressed, she preferred to create a more concise interface for Yahoo Mail and other services. , To develop new products, thereby ignoring product safety issues. Yahoo’s former staff said that Yahoo's security team’s funding requirements are often rejected because Mayer fears that over-emphasizing security will reduce Yahoo’s user base.
If only the security issue is revealed, it may indicate that Yahoo's luck is not very good, and it is targeted by hackers. However, helping the government to supervise the user's scanning of user e-mail messages can only indicate that Yahoo is "self-inflicted and cannot live."
This week, foreign media explodes Yahoo's order to submit to the Federal Intelligence Court. The real-time scanning of user e-mail messages feeds back the case to the FBI. Yahoo is the first company to have such large-scale data requirements in the American society that focuses on user privacy. It is also the first company to scan user information through design programs.
The former employee disclosed that at that time, the intelligence agency sent the monitoring request to Yahoo's legal department with encrypted mail. CEO Marissa Mayer and the legal director of the company, Bell, did not discuss it with the company's security department and took over the demand. , Arrange Yahoo email engineers to write a mail scanning program. Through this program, mail that meets the search requirements will be extracted and backed up at the remote hardware.
In view of these two scandals of Yahoo, AOL’s CEO Tim Armstrong expressed hesitation about Verizon’s acquisition plan and proposed to stop the acquisition plan or reduce the purchase price. According to the latest news, Tim Armstrong strongly supports Verizon to reduce Yahoo's purchase price by US$1 billion and use it as a technical reserve fund to prevent Yahoo's email from being hacked again.
At present, Yahoo's trading team is struggling to stop any discussions related to price cuts. Yahoo! is clarifying to Verizon that it cannot arbitrarily change the agreement that has been reached, and that the latter has no legal basis to change any terms of the transaction agreement. Yahoo will hold a board of directors in the next two weeks, but both parties are still discussing the details of the price reduction purchase.