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Russian spies implicated in mammoth Yahoo data breach

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By John Glenday, Reporter

March 16, 2017 | 2 min read

The US Department of Justice has identified two Russian spies and two freelance hackers as being responsible for the mammoth Yahoo data breach which came close to derailing its takeover by Verizon.

Yahoo lost account information for 500m members in 2014 making it one of the largest single data breaches in history and marks the first-time criminal charges have been leveled against Russian government officials implicated in a cyber-attack.

Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin are both officers of the Russian Federal Security Service while hackers Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov were allegedly paid by Russian spies to target American companies.

According to Mary McCord, assistant attorney general for national security, the operation was geared toward obtaining information about specific users and their accounts; including US government officials, Russian journalists and employees at other internet and financial firms targeted by the hackers.

Chris Madsen, assistant general counsel at Yahoo, said: “The indictment unequivocally shows the attacks on Yahoo were state-sponsored. We are deeply grateful to the FBI for investigating these crimes and the DOJ for bringing charges against those responsible.”

The four suspects face 47 criminal charges between them such as economic espionage, theft of trade secrets and aggravated identity theft.

Russian criminals have also been blamed for carrying out the world's 'biggest ever ad fraud' after snaffling $5m per day by tricking ad exchanges into believing fake websites were major platforms.

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