Russian Agents Were Behind Yahoo Hack, U. S. Says -
By VINDU GOEL and ERIC LICHTBLAUMARCH 15, 2017
In a development that can only heighten the distrust between American
and Russian authorities on cybersecurity, the Justice Department on Wednesday charged two Russian intelligence officers with directing a sweeping criminal conspiracy that broke into 500 million Yahoo accounts in 2014.
The Russian government then used the information it obtained from the intelligence officers
and two others named in the indictment — a Russian hacker and a Kazakh national living in Canada — to focus on foreign officials, business executives and journalists, federal prosecutors said.
The two thefts, the largest known breaches of a private company’s computer systems, had threatened to scuttle a deal
that Yahoo struck last summer to sell its internet businesses to Verizon Communications.
Details of the wide-ranging attack come as the United States government is investigating other Russian cyberattacks against American targets,
including the theft of emails last year from the Democratic National Committee and attempts to break in to state election systems.
The four men together face 47 criminal charges, including conspiracy, computer fraud, economic espionage, theft of trade secrets
and aggravated identity theft, the Justice Department said in a news release.
Yahoo has said for months that it believed that hackers sponsored by a foreign state were behind the attack
but it had refused to provide details of what occurred because the federal inquiry was ongoing.