500 million Yahoo accounts hacked

U.S. authorities may now be in a better position to figure out if Russian hackers and Russian spies swayed last year’s presidential elections.

A scheme uncovered during a federal investigation into a huge Yahoo security breach may have opened a window into other hacks potentially instigated by foreign governments, according to computer security experts.

That includes a separate FBI investigation into whether the Russian government hired hackers to interfere with the November election that put President Donald Trump into the Oval Office.

“This make you more optimistic that they will get to the bottom of what has been going on,” said Robert Cattanach, a former Department of Justice attorney now in private practice.

In the Yahoo case unsealed Wednesday, the Department of Justice alleged that two Russian intelligence agents hired a pair of hackers to engineer a heist that affected at least a half billion user accounts.

In a scheme that prosecutors say blended intelligence gathering with old-fashioned financial greed, the four men targeted the email accounts of Russian and U.S. government officials, Russian journalists and employees of financial services and other private businesses, U.S. officials said.

Using in some cases a technique known as “spear-phishing” to dupe Yahoo users into thinking they were receiving legitimate emails, the hackers broke into at least 500 million accounts in search of personal information and financial data such as gift card and credit card numbers, prosecutors said.

“We will not allow individuals, groups, nation states or a combination of them to compromise the privacy of our citizens, the economic interests of our companies or the security of our country,” said Acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord, the head of the Justice Department’s national security division.

The case, announced amid continued U.S. intelligence agency skepticism of their Russian counterparts, comes as U.S. authorities investigative Russian interference through hacking in the 2016 presidential election. Officials said those investigations are separate.

One of the Yahoo-related defendants, a Canadian and Kazakh national named Karim Baratov, has been taken into custody in Canada. Another, Alexsey Belan, is on the list of the FBI’s most wanted cyber criminals and has been indicted multiple times in the U.S. It’s not clear whether he or the other two defendants, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, will ever step foot in an American courtroom since there’s no extradition treaty with Russia.

“I hope they will respect our criminal justice system,” McCord said.

But Yahoo probably wouldn’t have been targeted in the first place if it hadn’t been viewed as easier prey than other major tech companies, including Google and Microsoft, also oversee email services with hundreds of millions of users, said Avivah Litan of Gartner Inc. “The criminals always go to the place of least resistance,” she said.

In a statement, Chris Madsen, Yahoo’s assistant general counsel and head of global security, thanked law enforcement agencies for their work.

“We’re committed to keeping our users and our platforms secure and will continue to engage with law enforcement to combat cybercrime,” he said.

Rich Mogull, CEO of the security firm Securosis, said the indictment “shows the ties between the Russian security service and basically the criminal underground,” something that had been “discussed in security circles for years.”

Cyber criminals gave Russian officials access to specific accounts they were targeting, and in return, Russian officials helped the criminals to evade authorities and let them keep the type of information that hackers that hack for money tend to exploit such as email addresses and logins and credit card information.

“We’ve come to expect that you don’t really figure out who performs these attacks,” Mogull said. The fact that the indictment ties together the FSB and criminals is a new development, he said. “It will be very interesting to see what comes up in court, and how they tie those two together.”