“We want to emphasize that the bankruptcy filing by DigiNotar, which was primarily a certificate authority, does not involve VASCO’s core two-factor authentication business,” said Jan Valcke, VASCO’s President and COO. “While we do not plan to re-enter the certificate authority business in the near future, we expect that we will be able to integrate the PKI/identity verification technology acquired from DigiNotar into our core authentication platform. As a result, we expect to be able to offer a stronger authentication product line in the coming year to our traditional customers.”
The entire press release sends a very clear message. And that is: “Investors, please stop selling VASCO stock!”
It’s interesting that just after the 19th of July, the day the DigiNotar breach was discovered internally, there is a significant fall of VASCO stock on a larger-than-normal volume. 1/4 of the share value was lost – that’s a significant decrease. It would be interesting to know who exactly decided to sell at that point…
Few public companies ever want investors to sell their stock, but the still-ongoing VASCO stock fire sale might have more to do with the bankruptcy than per se with the security breach. Admittedly, the security breach probably got the ball rolling initially, but the market often reacts to news of this sort promptly and then forgets all about it a short while later; in this case, the market doesn’t seem to be forgetting so rapidly, and I’d lay odds the bankruptcy is largely responsible for that.
I’d be interested to know just how much of the financial trouble leading to the bankruptcy was a result of the security breach. My guess would be they must’ve been struggling already, but that’s only speculation. It would be interesting to see numbers.