Hacker gets 5 years over Yahoo breach
Prosecutors say he worked unwittingly with Russian spies
SAN FRANCISCO — A young computer hacker who prosecutors say unwittingly worked with a Russian spy agency was sentenced to five years in prison Tuesday for using data stolen in a massive Yahoo data breach to gain access to private emails.
U.S. Judge Vince Chhabria also fined Karim Baratov $250,000 during a sentencing hearing in San Francisco.
Baratov was named in a federal indictment last year that charged two Russian spies with orchestrating the 2014 Yahoo breach involving 500 million users.
Baratov was charged with using that stolen data passed to him by Russia's Federal Security Service to hack dozens of email accounts of journalists, business leaders and others.
Prosecutors said Baratov, 23, was an “international hacker for hire” who did little or no research on his customers.
He pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. He acknowledged that he began hacking as a teen seven years ago and charged customers $100 a hack to access webbased emails.
Baratov, who was born in Kazakhstan but lived in Toronto, where he was arrested last year, charged customers to obtain another person's webmail passwords by tricking them to enter their credentials into a fake password reset page.
Prosecutors said in court papers that Baratov's Russian-language site named “webhacker” advertised services for “hacking of email accounts without prepayment.”
Prosecutors said Russian security service paid Baratov to target dozens of email accounts using information obtained from the Yahoo hack.
Baratov, who has been in custody since his arrest, told the judge that his time behind bars has been “a very humbling and eye-opening experience.”