The hacker, Vladimir Anikeyev, admitted his guilt in illegally gaining access to the private data of a number of targets, including high-ranking officials, according to news reports.
MOSCOW — After a two-day trial conducted behind closed doors, the Moscow City Court on Thursday sentenced Vladimir Anikeyev, the head of a hacking group that the authorities cracked down on last winter, to two years in a penal colony.
The state prosecutor had asked for a sentence of two and a half years.
Mr. Anikeyev, a former journalist who led a collective known as Shaltai Boltai — Humpty Dumpty — until his arrest last November, admitted his guilt in illegally gaining access to the private data of a number of targets, including high-ranking officials, businessmen and journalists, according to Russian news reports.
His cooperation with law enforcement made a swift trial possible, but the involvement of classified information meant it was closed to the public.
Among those whose email inboxes and mobile phones are said to have been penetrated are Natalya Timakova, the spokeswoman for Dmitri A. Medvedev, the prime minister and former president; Arkady Dvorkovich, a deputy prime minister; Andrei Belousov, an adviser to President Vladimir V. Putin and a former minister of economic development; and Dmitri Kiselyev, the Russian government’s chief propagandist.
Some of the information obtained by Shaltai Boltai was auctioned online. Emails stolen from Mrs. Timakova, for instance, netted Mr. Anikeyev’s team 150 bitcoins. Other information was used to blackmail officials, who had to pay Shaltai Boltai to keep it confidential.
Like other cybercriminals-turned-government hackers, Shaltai Boltai’s members are believed to have collaborated with Russian intelligence personnel, namely, those from the Federal Security Service.
That led to the arrest of Sergei Mikhailov, the deputy director of the service’s cybersecurity organ, and one of several individuals arrested around the same time as the members of Shaltai Boltai and charged with treason, though the authorities never publicly linked the two cases.
Mr. Mikhailov’s possible ties to Shaltai Boltai emerged in Russian news reports. Other Russian news outlets reported a competing theory for the intelligence officer’s arrest: that he had passed to the F. B. I. secrets about Russia ’s government-backed hacking programs, helping in the investigation of Russian meddling in the presidential election.
The security service detained Mr. Anikeyev after luring him to Russia from Ukraine, where he had lived for several years, with the promise of payment for a hacking operation.
Two fellow Shaltai Boltai hackers, Alexander Filinov and Konstantin Teplyakov, remain in detention. News outlets said that, unlike Mr. Anikeyev, they have refused to cooperate with investigators.
