Web Report

Dubai – With more than 1 billion active users, Yahoo had been a prime target for Russian spies and cyber criminals.

The Department of Justice said on Wednesday that it had charged four hackers responsible for the second largest breach in history, which Yahoo revealed last September.

The state-sponsored hackers in Russia and Canada were hit with wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage charges.

Two of the hackers were Russian spies under the Federal Security Service — the country’s equivalent of the US’s FBI, while the others were identified as hired criminals.

Karim Baratov, one of the hackers based in Canada, was arrested on Tuesday, while the other three Russian hackers could be protected from a complicated extradition process.

“There are no free passes for foreign state sponsored criminal behavior,” said Mary McCord, the acting assistant attorney general during a press conference on Wednesday.

The two-year investigation from the FBI’s San Francisco branch accused Russian spies Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchinof of helping break into Yahoo to steal information from US government officials, Russian dissidents and journalists.

The Russian spies allegedly left Baratov and hacker-for-hire Aleksey Belan the spoils, letting the two cybercriminals use the emails for profit. The Yahoo breach is be the largest hacking case ever handled by the US.