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Yahoo chose the path where no one goes—they lost one-quarter of the company’s cybersecurity team.
According to TechCrunch, the web services provider cut roughly one-fourth of “The Paranoids,” as its cybersecurity team is known, over the past year. The members who were either let go or lost by attrition included the entire red team unit. Job cuts at the company reportedly affected employees across Yahoo’s technology units.
“Outsourcing cybersecurity seems like the least secure thing a company can do,” a user on a Yahoo thread on website The Layoff commented.
Dogs of doom. In an emailed statement, Yahoo spokesperson Erin Miller told IT Brew that the cuts were part of a plan to transition the company’s security posture, which she claimed is “widely recognized as a world-class, industry-leading operation.”
“As part of this evolution, we’ve made strategic adjustments, including transitioning offensive security operations to an outsourced model,” Miller said. “This change reflects the sophistication of our program and enables us to concentrate resources on critical security priorities, maintaining the highest standards of protection for our users and platforms.”
Yahoo CTO Valeri Liborski sounded a more somber tone in an internal email to employees, saying, “This was a very difficult decision and one I have not taken lightly.”
News that must get through. While 2024 didn’t see the corporate bloodletting of early 2023, there were a number of large-scale tech layoffs. The year began with broad cuts to tech companies like Google, Amazon, and Apple.
As IT Brew reported, September layoffs at Cisco led to employees posting about their anger to online forums. “Working at Cisco is like gambling at a casino,” one said. A month earlier, layoffs at Intel led to 19,000 employees out of work. Yahoo itself laid off 20% of its workforce in 2023, cuts primarily targeted at its news, sports, and ad businesses.
12/17/2024 update: This story has been updated to reflect Yahoo’s claim that at least some of the employee loss was related to attrition.