Two Russian Spies Charged in Massive Yahoo Data Breach -- Update
16 March 2017 - 4:21AM
Dow Jones News
By Aruna Viswanatha
Federal authorities have charged four men, including two
officers from Russia's spy agency, with hacking computer systems at
Yahoo Inc. and stealing personal data that affected hundreds of
millions of Yahoo users, in the first such case to directly target
the Russian government.
Two of the men, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, are officers
at Russia's secretive Federal Security Service who protected,
directed, facilitated, and paid others to collect information
through computer intrusions in the U.S. and elsewhere, authorities
said.
Authorities said they worked with co-conspirators Alexsey Belan
and Karim Baratov to hack into computers of American companies
providing email and internet-related services.
Mr. Baratov, a Canadian and Kazakh national, was taken into
custody on Tuesday in Canada, authorities said. The other men are
believed to be in Russia. There is no extradition treaty between
Russia and the U.S., so U.S. authorities would only be able to get
them in custody if they travel overseas to another country that is
willing to send them to the U.S.
The men used unauthorized access to Yahoo's systems to steal
information from about at least 500 million Yahoo accounts and then
used some of that stolen information to obtain unauthorized access
to the contents of accounts at Yahoo, Google and other webmail
providers, including accounts of Russian journalists, U.S. and
Russian government officials and private-sector employees of
financial, transportation and other companies, the Justice
Department said in a statement Wednesday.
Other personal accounts belonged to employees of commercial
entities, such as a Russian investment banking firm, a French
transportation company, U.S. financial services and private-equity
firms, a Swiss bitcoin wallet and banking firm and a U.S. airline,
the Justice Department said.
Yahoo's servers were compromised by hackers in two separate
incidents, stealing data on more than 1 billion accounts during a
2013 incident. A separate 2014 incident, which Yahoo had previously
linked to "state-sponsored" hackers, compromised data on more than
500 million accounts.
The compromised data includes Yahoo addresses linked to more
than 150,000 members of the federal government and U.S. military,
according to an analysis by the security firm InfoArmor Inc.
The hacking incidents, both among the largest-ever reported
thefts of personal data, presented a major stumbling block to
Verizon Communications Inc.'s efforts to acquire Yahoo's core
business assets. Yahoo disclosed both breaches months after Verizon
made its initial bid on the internet company in July 2016. Last
month, the companies revised the terms of their deal, with Verizon
now paying $4.5 billion -- a $350 million price reduction -- and
both companies agreeing to split any future costs related to the
breaches.
Yahoo executives were apparently unaware of the 2013 breach
until December of last year, but the company knew of the 2014
incident soon after it occurred. It is unclear why Yahoo waited
approximately two years to disclose that breach, and this delay is
now the subject of an investigation by federal authorities,
including the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Last month, Yahoo's top lawyer, Ronald Bell, resigned in the
wake of the hacks, and Yahoo's board elected not to award Chief
Executive Marissa Mayer her 2016 cash bonus and accepted her offer
to forgo her 2017 equity awards.
A Yahoo board investigation blamed the mishandling of the
hacking incident on "failures in communication, management, inquiry
and internal reporting" and a "lack of proper comprehension," the
company said in an SEC filing earlier this month.
--Robert McMillan contributed to this article.
Write to Aruna Viswanatha at Aruna.Viswanatha@wsj.com
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
March 15, 2017 13:06 ET (17:06 GMT)
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