At a press conference this morning, Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general for national security, announced that four individuals have been charged for the massive breach of Yahoo that exposed 500 million accounts in 2014.
Two of the hackers charged by the Department of Justice are FSB officers who allegedly used Russia intelligence resources to pull it off.
The DOJ named three Russian suspects: Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, 33; Igor Anatolyevich Sushchin, 43; and Alexsey Alexseyevich Belan, 29. Dokuchaev and Sushchin are Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) officers, according to the department. The other suspect is Karim Baratov, 22, a Canadian resident from Kazakhstan who Canadian authorities arrested Tuesday. [...]
The suspects face a number of charges, according to the DOJ: conspiracy, computer fraud and abuse, economic espionage, theft of trade secrets, wire fraud, access device fraud and aggravated identity theft. The most serious of those charges, conspiring to commit wire fraud, carries a maximum sentence of 20 years.
According to the Justice Department, the breach was intended to ensnare journalists and public officials in both America and Russia which I imagine puts the Putin regime in a awkward position. It would be easier for them to deny the charges if they had simply been accused of hacking Americans. Russian surveillance of their own public officials and journalists isn't a secret.
This is one to watch because we don't know exactly who the FSB hoped to hack, but I expect that kind of detail will be revealed in court. The specificity of the charges, such as economic espionage and theft of trade secrets, suggests the Department of Justice knows exactly who the intended targets were.