Russian Federation denies it’s responsible for Yahoo hack

He said the case “underscores the complexity and the urgency” of the committee’s investigation of Russian interference in the USA election.

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 USA 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.

The money may have come, instead, from a secret life as a cyber hacker, including work for Russia’s top spy agency, according to charges filed on Wednesday.

Russian Federation has denied any involvement in the 2014 hack of internet giant Yahoo, after USA authorities charged four people over the incident.

While this has always been known in in intelligence circles, the charges against Russian intelligence officers in the Yahoo hacking case bring it out into the open. “The Russians have done really well, and most people would say that they have the upper hand, they have the initiative”, said James Lewis of the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “Russia has always expressed interest… in cooperation in the field of countering cybercrime and ensuring cybersecurity, we believe that this is one of the priorities in our time”. This comes after a data breach that impacted at least a half billion user accounts. If the latter theory is correct, it would undercut the argument the Yahoo hack was “state sponsored” in origin-and makes it more likely the hacks are another example of the Kremlin spy machine piggy-backing on the work of cyber-criminals. Disclosure of the two incidents led Verizon Communications Inc., which agreed previous year to buy Yahoo’s core internet business, to cut $350 million off the purchase price; it is now set to pay $4.5 billion. Yahoo said the hackers pilfered names, email addresses, dates of birth, telephone numbers and passwords. It’s a kind of secondary nervous system inside the Russian bureaucracy, running parallel to the official one, creating parallel chains of command and serving different goals than the official system whose tools it uses.

Interpol issued a “red notice” on Belan in relation to an earlier hacking campaign, according to the indictment.

Russia’s technical universities are among the world’s best and the country each year produces a bumper crop of highly-skilled graduates.

Paul Abbate, an FBI executive assistant director, said the bureau had had only “limited cooperation with that element of the Russian government in the past”, noting that prior US demands to turn over Belan had been ignored.

How did so many Yahoo accounts get hacked? Companies like Yahoo typically use bits of data called cookies to let you stay signed into an account via a web browser.

Instead, according to an account offered by USA officials, they methodically made their way deeper into Yahoo’s network over the space of months – maybe years. Yahoo knew of the breach and failed to investigate or notify users.

The suspects are also asserted to have scapegoated Google accounts.

Cybersecurity experts raised questions on how deep the Russians had access to Yahoo’s computer network. The announcement, however, was oddly silent about an even bigger breach of 1 billion accounts that took place in 2013, and which the company disclosed in December. The Verizon deal still keeps Yahoo on the book for most expenses of lawsuits and government investigations related to the hack.