US charges two Russian intelligence officers for Yahoo! breach

The US Department of Justice indicted two officers of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) for protecting, directing, facilitating and paying criminal hackers that have stolen over 500 million accounts of Yahoo! in 2014. A grand jury in the Northern District of California charged the two officials as well as the other two hackers for using the stolen information “to obtain unauthorized access to the contents of accounts at Yahoo, Google and other webmail providers, including accounts of Russian journalists, U.S. and Russian government officials and private-sector employees of financial, transportation and other companies”, as well as for obtaining financial gain through a spam campaign. According to the New York Times, the arm of the FSB in which the two officers work is supposed to help foreign intelligence agencies to catch cybercriminals, yet in this case the officials allegedly helped the hackers avoid detection. While Russian didn’t have an official reaction, the Sputnik News reminded that one of the two indicted officers was also “charged with treason and arrested by Russian authorities back in December 2016 along with his FSB superior Sergey Mikhailov and Kaspersky Lab’s top manager Ruslan Stoyanov”.