The Justice Department will formally charge four hackers who breached Yahoo and compromised millions of user accounts, Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for national security, announced Wednesday.
The DOJ named three Russian suspects: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33; Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43; and Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, 29. Dokuchaev and Sushchin are Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, according to the department. The other suspect is Karim Baratov, 22, a Canadian resident from Kazakhstan who Canadian authorities arrested Tuesday.
“The criminal conduct at issue, carried out and otherwise facilitated by officers from an FSB unit that serves as the FBI’s point of contact in Moscow on cybercrime matters, is beyond the pale,” McCord said Wednesday in a release Wednesday. “State actors may be using common criminals to access the data they want, but the indictment shows that our companies do not have to stand alone against this threat.”
Hackers have breached Yahoo at least twice in recent years. Upwards of 1 billion accounts were compromised in August 2013, and an additional 500 million accounts were stolen in 2014. Yahoo discovered and disclosed both breaches in 2016, as Verizon explored purchasing the tech giant. Verizon owns AOL, which is The Huffington Post’s parent company.
The charges announced Wednesday are in connection to the 2014 hack. They are not related to the hacking of the Democratic National Committee during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, which is also believed to have been directed by Russian government agents.
The suspects face a number of charges, according to a DOJ press release: conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, wire fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. The most serious of those charges, conspiring to commit wire fraud, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who has recused himself from any investigation connected to the presidential campaigns, is out of town to give a speech to law enforcement officials in Richmond, Virginia, and is not scheduled to attend the rollout. The acting deputy attorney general, Dana Boente, is accompanying Sessions.
This is a developing story. It will be updated.
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