The United State Department of Justice (DOJ) has charged four men, including two officials of Russia’s FSB intelligence agency, in connection with a the hacking attack against Yahoo which saw the details of 500 million users stolen and the large scale use of forged cookies to break into accounts.
In September last year, Yahoo revealed that in late 2014 an unnamed “state-sponsored actor” had accessed the account information of some approximately 500 million users including names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, hashed passwords and, in some cases, encrypted or unencrypted security questions and answers.
Yahoo believes that hackers managed to break into its own internal IT systems and accessed proprietary code that allowed the attackers to forge browser cookies, thereby granting them access to accounts without needing a password at all.
At the time it was dubbed by some as ‘the biggest data breach in history’ (although this was later overshadowed by the news that a separate data breach at Yahoo had occurred in 2014, impacting a staggering one billion users).
The DOJ’s indictment claims that 33-year-old Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev and 43-year-old Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, both officers in Russia’s FSB, directed and paid criminal hackers to collect information by hacking into the email accounts of thousands of individuals.
In the indictment, US authorities named two hackers as Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, aka “Magg,” 29, a Russian national and resident; and Karim Baratov, aka “Kay,” “Karim Taloverov” and “Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov,” a 22-year-old Canadian and Kazakh national, resident in Canada.
Belan is not an unknown name to cyber-crime fighting authorities, having previously been listed in the FBO’s Cyber Crime Most Wanted list, and having been previously detained in a European country in 2013 before escaping back to Russia to evade extradition.