Karim Baratov (a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov), a Kazakhstan-born Canadian citizen, was also ordered on Tuesday past times US of America Judge Vince Chhabria to pay a fine of $250,000.
Baratov had previously admitted his role inward the 2014 Yahoo information breach that compromised most 500 1 K 1000 Yahoo user accounts. His utilization was to "hack webmail accounts of individuals of involvement to the FSB," Russia's spy agency.
In November, Baratov pleaded guilty to a full of ix counts, including 1 count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud as well as Abuse Act, as well as 8 counts of aggravated identity theft.
According to the US Justice Department, Baratov as well as his co-defendant hacker Alexsey Belan worked for ii agents—Dmitry Dokuchaev as well as Igor Sushchin—from the FSB (Federal Security Service) to compromise the accounts.
The Justice Department announced charges for all of the iv people inward March terminal year, which resulted inward the arrest of Baratov inward Toronto at his Ancaster domicile as well as and then his extradition to the United States.
However, Belan—who is already on the FBI's Most Wanted Hackers list—and both FSB officers currently reside inward Russia, due to which they are unlikely to confront the consequences for their involvement.
Baratov ran an illegal no-questions-asked hacking service from 2010 until his arrest inward March 2017, wherein he charged customers or thence $100 to obtain some other person's webmail password past times tricking them to come inward their credentials into a imitation password reset page.
According to the courtroom documents, Baratov managed to fissure to a greater extent than than 11,000 electronic mail accounts inward both Russian Federation every bit good every bit the US of America earlier the Toronto Police Department caught him.
As constituent of his plea, Baratov admitted to hacking thousands of webmail accounts of individuals for 7 years as well as transportation those accounts' passwords to Russian spy Dokuchaev inward telephone commutation for money.
The targeted assault allowed the iv to gain right away access to Yahoo's internal networks, as well as 1 time in, co-defendant hacker Belan started poking or thence the network.
According to the FBI, Belan discovered ii primal assets:
- Yahoo's User Database (UDB) – a database containing personal information most all Yahoo users.
- The Account Management Tool – an administrative tool used to brand alterations to the targeted accounts, including their passwords.
Belan as well as then used the file transfer protocol (FTP) to download the Yahoo's UDB, which included password recovery emails as well as cryptographic values unique to each Yahoo account, eventually enabling Belan as well as Baratov to access specific accounts of involvement to the Russian spies.
According to Baratov's lawyers, at the fourth dimension of the crime, Baratov had no persuasion he was working amongst Russian FSB agents.
