The yahoo hacking of information in 2014 has reaped indictments of three Russian citizens, said to be FSB spies and a Russian cyber hacker, all of whom live in Russia. Extradition does not seem to be on the cards for them. The one and only arrest made in the case, is a Canadian national citizen named Karim Baratov, a/k/a “Kay,” a/k/a/Karim Taloverov, a/k/a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov. He is a 22-year-old charged with one count of conspiracy to commit computer fraud and over forty counts of aggravated ID theft. He was arrested in March in Canada and earlier this week extradition was waived.
He is now being held in California without bail. According to court documents, he has pleaded guilty to the charges.
Hacker admits to wrongdoing
In his plea agreement, according to a San Francisco federal court, he admitted from around 2010 he had hacked over 11.000 other webmail accounts for his co-conspirators, not only from Yahoo but from Google and Yandex. Baratov's job was to hack certain webmail accounts and send the passwords to his co-conspirators in Russia for money. He set up a phishing system so he could trick his victims into giving him their account information. He also admitted he placed ads on Russian hack-for-hire web pages to advertise his services. His services included hacking into credit cards accounts, login information from sites and financial information, all for money.
Russia played a big role
According to court records, it was Baratov's co-conspirator, 29-year-old, Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, aka “Magg,” a Russian national, that poached data from the Yahoo’s User Database that contained subscriber information, plus information required to authorize web browser cookies. Belan not only sold this info to other co-conspirators in Russia but used it for his own personal monetary gains.
He gained access to over 30 million accounts so he could implement his own scam with Yahoo's search engine traffic. He was indicted in 2012 and 2013 but managed to escape back to Russia before the paperwork for his extradition was completed.
It has been reported that Yahoo has lost millions of dollars with this breach, and that does not even take in the monetary losses for many of Yahoo's customers.
There were 23 class action consumer lawsuits filed by the end of 2016. Since this breach, companies continue to report large-scale data breaches that have made them stop and look at other ways to increase security on their data and networks.
