Tech
Hacker charged for massive Yahoo data breach in 2014 pleads not guilty
Canadian Karim Baratov has pleaded not guilty to all charges in a US court that he helped Russian agents conduct the massive 2014 cyberattack on Yahoo that saw the data theft of more than 500 million Yahoo user accounts.
The 22-year-old Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan was arrested in Canada in March at the request of US prosecutors and has been charged with gaining unauthorised access to more than 80 Yahoo accounts in exchange for commissions.
According to court documents, Baratov and 29-year-old Russian hacker Alexsey Belan were hired by two officers in Russia’s Federal Security Services (FSB) — Dmitry Dokuchaev and his superior Igor Sushchin — to break into Yahoo’s network.
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Between November to December 2014, Belan allegedly stole a copy of a portion of Yahoo’s user database that included sensitive subscriber information such as users’ names, recovery email accounts, phone numbers and certain information required to manually create account authentication web browser cookies for over 500 million Yahoo accounts.
Belan also managed to gain illegal access to Yahoo’s Account Management Tool, which is a “proprietary means by which Yahoo made and logged changes to user accounts.”
Belan, Dokuchaev and Sushchin then used the stolen data to “locate Yahoo email accounts of interest and to mint cookies for those accounts, enabling the co-conspirators to access at least 6,500 such accounts without authorization.”
Among the four co-conspirators, Baratov is the only person arrested in the case so far. The others are among the FBI’s most-wanted cyber criminals.
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