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Dado Ruvic / Reuters
The Justice Department charged four men — two of whom are Russian Federal Security Service, or FSB officers — Wednesday for stealing the personal information of at least 500 million Yahoo customers in a pair of breaches that rocked the company's reputation and slashed hundreds of millions of dollars off its sale to Verizon.
The other two defendants were criminal hackers hired by the Russian officials to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo's network. The stolen account information was used to gain additional content from customers' Yahoo accounts and accounts tied to other email providers, including Google.
Both Russian journalists and American diplomatic officials were then targeted using the information stolen in the hack. The charges for one of the largest computer hacks in American history, included conspiracy, economic espionage, wire fraud, and aggravated identity theft.
In December, Yahoo first revealed that hackers had stolen customer information from 1 billion Yahoo accounts in an attack dating back to 2013. The massive breach was separate from the major intrusion that the Russian officials were charged with. That data breach was announced in September, when Yahoo said 500 million accounts had been compromised by a state sponsored hacker in 2014. In both cases Yahoo said users' email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, and passwords were likely stolen.
Yahoo declined to comment.
News of the attacks came just months after Verizon announced plans to buy Yahoo for $4.83 billion last summer. The embarrassing disclosures prompted Verizon to seek a nearly 20 percent discount of Yahoo's sale price, totaling $925 million. But the two companies instead agreed to slash $395 off the deal price because of the damage from the breaches.
Following the company's review of the 2014 breach, Yahoo said CEO Marissa Mayer would not receive her 2016 annual bonus. Mayer also said she would forgo her 2017 equity award. Together, the pay cut appears to amount to a personal loss of $14 million, but Mayer will still receive a $23 million “golden parachute” once Verizon's purchase of Yahoo is completed later this year.
Read the indictment here:
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