Having been in the role of advocating investing in security the typical questions are;

   * "Will the product run faster?",
   * "Will the customers get better service?",
   * "Will someone choose us over a competitor 
      because of this?" 

But if you can say, "When you try to sell this company to another company, the strong security policies and technology this funding will provide insurance against having a security breach like Yahoo! and tanking the sales price."

Now that resonates because they probably have a lot to win or lose over the sales price of the company in a merger/acquisition strategy.

"Its a few million now, but without it, it could cost you billions of personal wealth down the road. Now who's in?"

So you go to the annual planning meeting and you pitch to the execs ,,, We want to take 5 engineers to first fix the password encryption we are using, second to update all the databases, third to build and test a system that makes swapping out the encryption method of passwords easier and less disruptive in the future, and finally updating the build system to do some sort of regression test on passwords to insure we aren't creating new services with weak algorithms.

The person after you pitches ... we'd like to take 5 engineers to build an algorithm to identify viral videos on the web and then put them into an iframe on our properties, thus increasing the length of time someone spends on our web pages which early A/B testing with some hand picked videos suggests increases revenue per page by .5%.

They give the 5 engineers to the kitten project it makes for more revenue.

A year goes by, the security guy pitches and the second pitch is "Our videos are doing great but we have discovered that people really hate that it takes three clicks to change their preferences on page layout. We want the 5 engineers to tweak the portal pages to make customization easier and we'll add a frictionless ad portal where they can just click on a product that appears and it will order it for them."

The updated portal gets the 5 engineers.

Now they are at a due diligence meeting with a potential suitor who discovers that millions of passwords were breached and later compromised because for years they knew they were using an insecure way of storing them but had not done anything about it. This materially affects what they consider the 'value' of the company to be.

The challenge is that if the security guy is really good the customers don't "see" anything, just their password is better protected than it was, and future projects start with strong password management systems. So from the people visiting the web property "nothing" changes. From the executive planning group's perspective they have spent 5 precious head count on a feature that they will have no way of "reporting" its success either in their own resumes or to their bosses. Kittens and better click through? Easy to measure and report and you can point at dollars in the bank as the benefit.

That said, the alternatives are much worse than the price of security.

How will this pragmatically trickle down to middle managers and their subordinates? With politics and personal incentive that are potentially unaligned with the company's long term interests (not having a data breach), will more resources actually be spent on security?

The return on investment of information security is not obvious / tangible, especially on a quarterly basis. Data breaches are "black swan" events, rarely occurring but with disproportionate consequences when they do occur. It's harder to quantitatively track progress, or lack thereof, of investment into security.

People can (over) claim the amount of time reallocated to security. These claims would be hard to falsify. Teams who are behind on other deadlines can blame time being reallocated to information security. Managers can use the purported reallocated time to spend on feature work, or whatever it is that makes them look objectively better for promotion.

I admit I'm being a bit cynical. I think company culture would help mitigate these issues. Executives valuing information security, even if it's just words rather than policy, nurtures such a culture.

For middle management and below, if upper management doesn't care about security, despite the "look at Yahoo" argument, then you'll find no leverage there for security funding. If they care at all, then managers and individual contributors can argue for security to stand out and accelerate their career. Yahoo's security troubles brighten the spotlight on the need for security funding at companies for training, audits, and setting aside time to do retroactive security work. It's not a silver bullet, but it helps.

[0] OWASP has a lot of great web security resources. Here is their top 10 list from 2013, https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Top_Ten_Cheat_Sheet

Some people say it materially affected their brand value but outside of the costly downtime during the holiday sales period I am not certain it affected their brand much if at all.

If people ask, just doing my day job'

edit: care to explain the downvotes?

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/gadfly/articles/2016-12-15/yahoo-s...

[0]http://www.investopedia.com/stock-analysis/070215/why-yahoos... from April, but the prices haven't moved too much since.

Now light the chairs on fire.

It can get worse.

Drops in BABA's share price tend to be mirrored in YHOO's, so that's responsible for a decent portion (albeit less than half) of today's dip.

Of course Mr. Robot could itself be a symptom of the zeitgeist.

The problem is that it's hard to evaluate security. Unless you know the area very well, it's hard to hire someone that knows the area well, which is a catch-22.

Do we know that Yahoo skimped on security, or did they just not get what they paid for because they didn't know better?

I'm seriously flabbergasted that they continue to let this happen. The last time you would've thought head would roll, they would batten down the hatches, notify users and be completely proactive in defending against another attack.

To me, it looks like they just said, "Well, fuck it, it won't happen again, why invest the time and money to protect our users?" I'd also point out the breech they're referencing was from 2013 so any data that was pilfered has already been running wild on the underground and been passed around a few thousand times. Another reason it just shows they don't care at all.

After this, no investor should touch this company with a ten foot pole.

The delay in them discovering the breach isn't that alarming either. If you didn't have systems in place to detect an intrusion, how do you retroactively find one? Companies usually don't find out until law enforcement contacts them or they accidentally stumble across the backdoor.

So, does Yahoo still have poor infosec? I'd guess so. But this newest breach isn't evidence of that, it only shows how bad their security was in 2013.

Even if Verizon end up paying the full price, the fact that investors really worried that they wouldn't is enough to share future companies.

If you care about your data you are basically only able to secure it if you host it yourself.

It's pretty revolting, but my assumption is that if the US government _really_ wants your data, it's virtually impossible to block all the vectors they have to get at it.

It's important that people also don't fall into the illusion that their Infosec skills can match that of google/apple engineers. These guys are some of the best there is.