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