Hacks might not harm Verizon-Yahoo pact

The second major hack of Yahoo’s user accounts is unlikely to derail Verizon’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.”

Within the past few years, hackers have infiltrated Sony, Target, Home Depot, JPMorgan Chase & Co., auction site EBay 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 more than 35 million critical personal records, including social security and passport numbers and medical and banking data, were exposed in 2016.

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.