Texarkana Gazette

Russian agents, hackers charged in Yahoo breach

- By Eric Tucker

WASHINGTON—Two Russian intelligen­ce agents and a pair of hired hackers have been charged in a devastatin­g criminal breach at Yahoo that affected at least a half billion user accounts, the Justice Department said Wednesday in bringing the first case of its kind against current Russian government officials.

In a scheme that prosecutor­s say blended intelligen­ce gathering with old-fashioned financial

greed, the four men targeted the email accounts of Russian and U.S. government officials, Russian journalist­s and employees of financial services and other private businesses, U.S. officials said.

Using in some cases a technique known as “spear-phishing” to dupe Yahoo users into thinking they were receiving legitimate emails, the hackers broke into at least 500 million accounts in search of personal informatio­n and financial data such as gift card and credit card numbers, prosecutor­s said.

“We will not allow individual­s, groups, nation states or a combinatio­n of them to compromise the privacy of our citizens, the economic interests of our companies or the security of our country,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division.

The case, announced amid continued U.S. intelligen­ce agency skepticism of their Russian counterpar­ts, comes as U.S. authoritie­s investigat­e Russian interferen­ce through hacking in the 2016 presidenti­al election. Officials said those investigat­ions are separate.

One of the Yahoo-related defendants, a Canadian and Kazakh national named Karim Baratov, has been taken into custody in Canada. Another, Alexsey Belan, is on the list of the FBI’s most wanted cyber criminals and has been indicted multiple times in the U.S. It’s not clear whether he or the other two defendants, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, will ever step foot in an American courtroom since there’s no extraditio­n treaty with Russia. “I hope they will respect our criminal justice system,” McCord said.

The indictment identifies Dokuchaev and Sushchin as officers of the Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB. Belan and Baratov were paid hackers directed by the FSB to break into the accounts, prosecutor­s said.

Dokuchaev has been in custody in Russia since his arrest on treason charges in December, along with his superior and several others. Russian media have reported that Dokuchaev and his superior were accused of passing sensitive informatio­n to the CIA. The media reports also have contended that Dokuchaev was arrested by the FSB several years ago and offered a choice: serve a long prison sentence on hacking charges or sign a contract to work for the agency.

The FSB hasn’t commented, and the Justice Department did not confirm that.

Yahoo didn’t disclose the breach until last September when it began notifying hundreds of millions of users that their email addresses, birth dates, answers to security questions and other personal informatio­n may have been stolen. Three months later, Yahoo revealed it had uncovered a separate hack in 2013 affecting about 1 billion accounts, including some that were also hit in 2014.

U.S. officials said it was especially galling that the scheme involved officers from a Russian counteresp­ionage service that theoretica­lly should be working collaborat­ively with its FBI counterpar­ts. “Rather than do that type of work, they actually turned against that type of work,” McCord said.

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 U.S. demands to turn over Belan had been ignored.

Though the U.S. government has previously charged individual Russian hackers with cybercrime—as well as hackers directly linked to the Chinese and Iranian government­s—this is the first criminal case to name as defendants sitting members of the FSB for hacking charges, the Justice Department said.

U.S. intelligen­ce authoritie­s have concluded that Russian intelligen­ce agencies were behind hacking efforts of Democratic email accounts in last year’s election. Officials say this case is separate from that investigat­ion, though one of the defendants in the Yahoo case, Belan, was among the Russians sanctioned last year by the Obama administra­tion.

The indictment, which includes charges of economic espionage, trade secret theft and unauthoriz­ed access to protected computers, arise from a compromise of Yahoo user accounts that began at least as early as 2014.

The Justice Department’s assertion that the FSB was directing the hacking likely provides political and legal cover for Yahoo, which saw its multibilli­on-dollar deal with Verizon teeter after it was forced to warn consumers that their private informatio­n might have been exposed.

Companies are more likely to be blamed for security incompeten­ce when their networks are compromise­d by thieves or wayward teenagers than when they become the targets of sophistica­ted espionage carried out by foreign government­s.

In a statement, Chris Madsen, Yahoo’s assistant general counsel and head of global security, thanked law enforcemen­t agencies for their work.

“We’re committed to keeping our users and our platforms secure and will continue to engage with law enforcemen­t to combat cybercrime,” he said.

Rich Mogull, CEO of the security firm Securosis, said the indictment “shows the ties between the Russian security service and basically the criminal undergroun­d,” something that had been “discussed in security circles for years.”

Cyber criminals gave Russian officials access to specific accounts they were targeting, and in return, Russian officials helped the criminals to evade authoritie­s and let them keep the type of informatio­n that hackers that hack for money tend to exploit such as email addresses and logins and credit card informatio­n.

 ?? AP Photo/ Susan Walsh ?? Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord, center, accompanie­d by U.S. Attorney for the Northern District Brian Stretch, left, and FBI Executive Director Paul Abbate, speaks Wednesday at the Justice Department in Washington.
AP Photo/ Susan Walsh Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord, center, accompanie­d by U.S. Attorney for the Northern District Brian Stretch, left, and FBI Executive Director Paul Abbate, speaks Wednesday at the Justice Department in Washington.

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