Justice Department charges Russian agents and criminal hackers with Yahoo breach

Canadian resident Baratov was arrested Tuesday in that country on a provisional US arrest warrant, and his case is now before a Canadian court.

According to the report, two operatives working for the Russian intelligence agency FSB and two state-sponsored cyber criminals will be charged with economic espionage, wire fraud, trade secret theft and hacking.

The Russian spies are FSB operatives, the report notes, while the criminal hackers were hired by the Russians.

During the press conference, DoJ officials said they had requested, via official channels, the individuals be remanded to US authorities, but that the DoJ has received no reply. Five months before then he was arrested in a European country, DOJ says, but “he was able to escape to Russian Federation before he could be extradited”. “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”. The Yahoo email accounts nearly certainly provided sensitive personal data to Russia’s increasingly unpredictable spy agencies.

But the indictment of two Russian spies – named as Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin – by the US Justice Department makes the situation different.

The hack, which the DOJ said was initiated in January 2014, affected at least 500 million Yahoo accounts. He is accused of directing the Yahoo hack along with his superior, the 43-year-old Sushchin.

Law enforcement services from other nations contributed to the investigation, as well: the UK’s MI5, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the Toronto police department, which carried out the only arrest in the case on Tuesday.

An official announcement is expected by the Justice Department a press conference in Washington, D.C. scheduled for 11:30 am ET.

Hackers compromised Yahoo’s YHOO, -0.91% servers in two separate incidents, stealing data on more than 1 billion accounts during a 2013 incident.

The breaches have resulted in millions of dollars in legal costs, and led to more than 40 lawsuits.

In the release, Yahoo said names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates, were stolen. Yahoo will also pay half for any non-Securities and Exchange Commission investigations and lawsuits related to the hacks.

The two largest hacks, and Yahoo’s much-criticized slow response and disclosure, forced a discount of $350 million in what had been a $4.83 billion deal to sell Yahoo’s main assets to Verizon.