The U. S. Department of Justice has confirmed earlier reports and accused two Russian FSB officers and two criminal hackers of being behind the hacking of at..
The U. S. Department of Justice has confirmed earlier reports and accused two Russian FSB officers and two criminal hackers of being behind the hacking of at least 500 million Yahoo accounts — saying the conspiracy to exploit illegal access and stolen data began at least as early as January 2014, with info garnered via the intrusion continuing to be utilized by the group at least until December 2016.
In a press release announcing the indictment of the four defendants, the DoJ accuses them of using unauthorized access to Yahoo’s systems to steal information from “about at least 500 million Yahoo accounts” and then using some of the stolen information to obtain unauthorized access to the contents of accounts at Yahoo, Google and other webmail providers — including the accounts of Russian journalists, U. S. and Russian government officials and private-sector employees of financial, transportation and other companies.
One of the defendants is also accused of exploiting his access to Yahoo’s network for personal financial gain — by searching Yahoo user communications for credit card and gift card account numbers, redirecting a subset of Yahoo search engine web traffic so he could make commissions and enabling the theft of the contacts of at least 30 million Yahoo accounts to facilitate a spam campaign.
The four defendants are identified as:
In a summary of the allegations, the DoJ asserts that the FSB officer defendants, Dokuchaev and Sushchin, “protected, directed, facilitated and paid criminal hackers to collect information through computer intrusions in the U. S. and elsewhere” — working with co-defendants Belan and Baratov specifically to obtain access to the email accounts of “thousands” of individuals.
It writes:
The DoJ says some victim accounts were of “predictable interest” to the FSB, Russia’s foreign intelligence and law enforcement service, such as personal accounts belonging to Russian journalists; Russian and U. S. government officials; employees of a prominent Russian cybersecurity company; and numerous employees of other providers whose networks the conspirators sought to exploit.
