Accused hacker to stay in custody

TORONTO• A Canadian accused in a massive hack of Yahoo emails will have to stay in custody as he prepares to fight extradition to the United States.

Lawyers for Karim Baratov said Friday the 22-yearold’s bid to contest a judge’s decision to deny him bail has been dismissed.

In his April ruling, Ontario Superior Court Justice Alan Whitten found the young man was too much of a flight risk to be released on bail.

The judge also said Baratov’s parents — who offered close to $1 million in cash and assets as collateral — would not make suitable supervisors because they had not questioned his growing wealth or his business activities while he was living with them.

Whitten further said he believed Baratov would be motivated to flee, given that he could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted in the U.S.

At an appeal hearing earlier this week, Baratov’s lawyers argued that Whitten made several errors, including amplifying the Hamilton man’s alleged connection to the Yahoo hack and the Russian intelligence agent who allegedly hired him.

“(Our argument is) painting him as a small fish, and not affiliated to the Yahoo hack,” Baratov’s lawyer Amedeo DiCarlo said outside court on Monday when the appeal was heard.

His legal team said in court that there’s no evidence to suggest Baratov was involved in the large-scale breach of Yahoo security systems.

Emails between Baratov and his alleged contact in the Russian intelligence service show he was only allegedly hired to hack into 80 accounts, and only allegedly succeeded in accessing seven, they said.

Hacking into several individual accounts is “fundamentally different” from breaching Yahoo’s security system and gaining access to data from nearly half a billion accounts, argued Ravin Pillay, another one of Baratov’s lawyers.

“There’s no evidence that Mr. Baratov knew who (the person who hired him, Dmitry) Dokuchaev was or that he was FSB,” Pillay said.

He also noted that Dokuchaev only allegedly transferred $104 into Baratov’s PayPal account. “If the applicant knew he was dealing with a government official from another country, $104 is not a lot of money for his trouble,” Pillay said.

But Crown Attorney Heather Graham said that money is only what was allegedly transferred to Baratov’s PayPal accounts, suggesting further funds could have been sent to other accounts American investigators have not been able to access.

Baratov was arrested in March under the Extradition Act after U.S. authorities indicted him and three others — two of them allegedly officers of Russia’s Federal Security Service — for computer hacking, economic espionage and other crimes.

DiCarlo says they will now focus their efforts on challenging the extradition order.