Verizon on Thursday said that it was leaning toward declaring as a "material" event the data breach disclosed three weeks ago by Yahoo.
Verizon is in talks with Yahoo to purchase the tech firm's core business.
"I think we have a reasonable basis to believe right now that impact is material," Craig Silliman, general counsel for Verizon, 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.
U.S. officials said privately that the FBI believes the breach was the work of Russian government hackers. But the state-sponsored nature of the hack does not affect the analysis of materiality, Silliman said.
"From a legal perspective," he said, "the question ... 'is it a state-sponsored attack'? isn't really relevant in terms of what we're looking at. The question is whether this [had] a material or an adverse effect on the asset we are buying."
Business on 10/14/2016