Verizon CEO says the report that he wants a $1 billion discount on hacked Yahoo is pure ‘speculation’ (YHOO, VZ)

Verizon CEO Lowell McAdam says he’s not surprised by the massive Yahoo hack and sought to dispel reports that Verizon is seeking a $1 billion discount on its pending acquisition of Yahoo.

Speaking at Virtuous Circle 2016, a tech conference hosted by the Internet Association, McAdam said there was nothing shocking about the data breach at Yahoo. The breach, which led to information on at least 500 million personal Yahoo accounts being stolen, is simply the “state of the way the internet operates” these days, McAdam said.

“I’m not that shocked. It’s not a question of if you’re going to get hacked — it’s when you’re going to get hacked,” McAdam told the crowd. “I think people are going to realize that this is the state of the way the internet operates.”

McAdam stressed that the company still puts a lot of resources in cybersecurity to prevent such attacks from happening. But the attacks have become so sophisticated that “occasionally they’re going to land a punch,” he said.

When asked about last week’s NY Post report that said Verizon was demanding a $1 billion discount on the $4.8 billion price tag for Yahoo because of the hack, McAdam suggested that the report was false.

“That’s total speculation. We still see a real value in the asset,” McAdam said, adding that he didn’t even bother reading the article.

“From what I understand, they actually got one thing right and that that was the closing price of our stock,” he said.

McAdam pointed out that the company’s still trying to figure out if the data breach had any “material impact” on the overall business. But he also stressed that there’s a lot of speculation around the investigation and that we need to “understand the real facts” around it before jumping to conclusions.