For those who argue that President Trump is too soft on Vladimir Putin and Russia, consider this: On Wednesday, the Justice Department is expected to announce the indictments of two members of the Russian government along with two criminal hackers for stealing into 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014.
The indictments are the first U.S. criminal cyber charges ever against Russian government officials, according to The Washington Post. The two officials, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, his superior, work for the FSB, which is similar to the FBI’s cyber division. Dokuchaev, whose hacker alias was “Forb,” was arrested in Moscow by the Russian government for passing information to the CIA, then allegedly agreed to work for the FSB to avoid prosecution for bank card fraud.
The two hackers are Alexsey Belan, who is currently under protection in Russia, and has been charged with hacking into three major tech firms in Nevada and California in 2012 and 2013, and Karim Baratov, born in Kazakhstan but later became a Canadian citizen. He was arrested in Canada on Tuesday.
All four men will be charged by the U.S. government with hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage.
Yahoo reported the 2014 data breach – the largest in history – last fall, later revealing another hack that was made into over 1 billion user accounts in 2013. There is no evidence yet as to whether the two hacks are related.
The Post reported:
The compromised accounts may have affected more than just email. Breaking into a Yahoo account would give the hackers access to users’ activity on Flickr, Tumblr, fantasy sports and other Yahoo applications. In the 2014 hack, the FSB — Russia’s Federal Security Service, and a successor to the KGB — sought the information for intelligence purposes, targeting journalists, dissidents and U.S. government officials, but allowed the criminal hackers to use the email cache for the officials’ and the hackers’ financial gain, through spamming and other operations.
Yahoo’s sale to Verizon was renegotiated after the two hacks; Yahoo had to lower its price.