Yahoo Hacker Sentenced To Five Years

Karim Baratov, a Canadian that has been charged with hacking Yahoo‘s email for the Russians, has been sentenced to 60 months.

Bloomberg, citing court proceedings, reported that Baratov was charged with computer fraud and is one of four people slapped with charges last year for a hacker scam that was tied to Russia’s FSB security agency. Baratov has pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit computer fraud and identity theft in November, noted Bloomberg.  The report noted that prosecutors wanted to sentence Baratov to 94 months in prison, but he requested 45 months. He was also hit with a $250,000 fine, noted Bloomberg. Federal prosecutors contend Baratov was hired to access 80 million Yahoo email accounts and 50 Google accounts. To get access to the email accounts, the hacker used spear phishing attacks and fake emails to trick people into providing sensitive information. He sold the passwords to Dmitry Dokuchaev, a known cybercriminal, reported Bloomberg. citing the indictment.

In October Yahoo announced that it now believes a 2013 security breach exposed all 3 billion of its users at the time. According to news from Bloomberg Technology, Yahoo obtained the new information after Verizon acquired it for $4.5 billion. Initially, Yahoo announced that 1 billion accounts had been compromised. The stolen information didn’t include passwords in clear text, payment data or bank accounts. Yahoo is notifying users. The company is facing a nationwide lawsuit lodged against it on behalf of more than 1 billion users; it remains to be seen if that number will rise with this new reveal. Verizon and Altaba Inc., the former owner of the Yahoo internet assets acquired by Verizon, agreed earlier this year to split the liability costs of consumer and business lawsuits related to the breach. Altaba also has to cover any shareholder liability costs. “Certainly, this makes the hack look worse than Verizon and the rest of us thought, but I don’t know that that materially changes the valuation of Yahoo as a company or the ongoing cost of dealing with the hack,” said Jan Dawson, an analyst at Jackdaw Research.