TWO RUSSIANS CHARGED IN YAHOO BREACH
Government accuses Russia of leading attack on computer systems.
Two Russian intelligence agents and two hackers have been charged in a devastating breach at Yahoo that affected at least half a billion user accounts, the Justice Department said in bringing the first case of its kind against Russian government officials.
The U.S. government accused Russia of directing some of the world’s most notorious hackers to break into computer systems, namely a half-billion accounts at Yahoo, in a broad scheme pairing cybercrime with intelligence gathering.
The broadside against the Russian government appeared in an indictment unsealed Wednesday in San Francisco federal court against two Russian FSB security agents and a pair of criminal hackers. Only one was arrested, a Canadian. The U.S. government has little chance of getting the other three extradited from Russia but was sending a message to Moscow that heightened cyberactivity wouldn’t be tolerated.
“We have reason to believe, based on our evidence, they were acting in their capacity as FSB officials,” said Mary McCord, acting assistant attorney general for the Department of Justice’s national security division.
“We will not allow individuals, groups, nation states or a combination of them to compromise the privacy of our citizens, the economic interests of our companies or the security of our country.”
Prosecutors accused the four of conspiracy, economic espionage, wire fraud and theft of trade secrets connected to the 2014 Yahoo breach, which threatened to derail its acquisition by Verizon Communications Inc. and ultimately led to a lower purchase price. The U.S. indictment essentially contends that the hackers had access to the accounts of 30 million users of Yahoo.
“The indictment unequivocally shows the attacks on Yahoo were statesponsored,” said Chris Madsen, an assistant general counsel for security and law enforcement at Yahoo.
The indictment appears to pull back the curtain on the use of criminal hackers by Russia’s spy agencies to attack key U.S. targets, including the largest purveyors of web-based e-mail, Google and Yahoo.
It lists a diverse group of hacking victims in the U.S. including the White House and its military and diplomatic corps. The missions also reaped information on a swath of global companies and their executives, including a U.S. financial services company, an airline and private equity firms.
The U.S. also reveals how Russia has used criminal operations to hide government spy activities, sheltering those criminals from prosecution while using the threat of charges as a recruiting tool for the country’s best criminal talent.
Aleksey Alekseyevich Belan was charged in the Yahoo case. He has been charged twice for cyberattacks of technology companies. The agents from the FSB included Igor Sushchin and Dmitry Dokuchaev.
Karim Baratov, a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan, was arrested in Canada and charged by the U.S.