Verizon! surprisingly! OK! with! Yahoo! despite! mega-hack!

Can't get that bonus if the merger falls through, so meh, shave off 5% and let's go

Verizon will savagely slash its acquisition offer for hacker-ransacked Yahoo! by, wait a minute, just 5.2 per cent, it is claimed.

We're hearing that the telecom giant has decided to lower its $4.8bn offer for what remains of the Purple Palace by roughly $250m. According to Bloomberg, the discount will be $250m, while The Wall Street Journal places the adjustment at $300m.

Verizon declined to comment on either report.

Yahoo! admitted in a pair of announcements last year that hackers had broken into the web company's systems, and raided a database of more a billion Yahoo! customers, swiping personal information and hashed passwords.

Intruders also snatched internal code that generates session cookies, allowing the miscreants to log into Yahoo! accounts without using any passwords, a detail Yahoo! noted in a December note and has now begun formally alerting customers about.

Both companies say the revised takeover deal will include a provision that Verizon and Yahoo! share the liability for the legal fallout in the case.

The new figure is not a particularly steep discount from a buyout deal worth more than $4.5bn. It could be argued that this reflects just how little Verizon values Yahoo!'s web services.

Verizon has long said that it is largely interested in the Purple Palace for its content network (read: desktop and mobile sites), and that it plans to fold those Yahoo! sites in with fellow internet has-been Aol to create a handful of properties it can flog to advertisers. ®