US charges two FSB officers, two “criminal hackers” in Yahoo breach

DOJ: FSB office responsible for liaison with FBI on cybersecurity hired Yahoo hackers.

The United States Department of Justice announced today indictments of four suspects in the criminal intrusion and theft of data from over 500 million Yahoo users. In a statement this morning, acting Assistant Attorney General Mary McCord said that two officers of Russia's Federal Security Service (FSB) hired two criminal hackers—one of them already on the FBI's Most Wanted list—to break into Yahoo and gain access to the accounts of US government and political figures, Russian journalists, and other individuals.

"Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, both FSB officers, protected, directed, facilitated and paid criminal hackers to collect information through computer intrusions in the United States and elsewhere," McCord said. "They worked with co-conspirators Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov to hack into computers of American companies providing email and internet-related services, to maintain unauthorized access to those computers and to steal information, including information about individual users and the private contents of their accounts."

McCord added that Belan and Baratov then used the access to commit additional crimes, including stealing electronic gift cards and using contact information found in the accounts for other fraud schemes.

Baratov was arrested last night by the Toronto Police Department's fugitive squad. Belan and the two FSB officers are in Russia; the US has requested they be handed over to face charges, but the US has no extradition treaty with Russia, and Russia has not been cooperative in regards to existing charges against Belan. Additionally, Dokuchaev and Sushchin are members of FSB's "Center 18", the office within the agency that has been designated as the point of contact for cooperation with the FBI on other matters.

McCord said that there was no connection between this investigation and the investigation into the breach of the Democratic National Committee.

Ars will update this story with more details as they become available.