Hacker Involved in Compromising of Millions of Yahoo Accounts Gets 5-Year Jail Term

Hacker Karim Baratov has been sentenced to a five-year jail term for his involvement in the massive Yahoo breach in 2014, which compromised millions of email accounts, and other related charges.

The sentence was announced on Tuesday by U.S. District Judge Vince Chhabria and was supposedly finalized last month. Apart from his prison sentence, Baratov was also slammed with a $250,000 fine.

Baratov, 23, pleaded guilty to various cyber hacking charges last November. According to CBC, Baratov was hired to steal people’s email login credentials. The Canadian hacker previously admitted to illegally accessing around 11,000 thousand email accounts in a span of seven years prior to his arrest in 2017.

Ultimately, however, law enforcement was led to Baratov after he was found involved in a massive Russia-linked cyber breach that exposed more than 500 million Yahoo email accounts. But over the course of the court proceedings, Baratov’s defense lawyers maintained that the man did not actually know he was working for Russian spy agents.

The five-year prison sentence Baratov received is somewhat meeting in the mid-ground between the prosecutors' demand of over seven years of imprisonment against the defense counsels’ recommendation of more than three years of jail time.

“Criminal hackers and the countries that sponsor them make a grave mistake when they target American companies and citizens. We will identify them wherever they are and bring them to justice,” said Assistant Attorney General Demers in a statement following Baratov’s sentencing.

“I would like to thank Canadian law enforcement authorities for their tremendous assistance in bringing Baratov to justice. We will continue to work with our foreign partners to find and prosecute those who would violate our laws,” Demers added.

Unfortunately for Baratov, he is going to be the only person of interest that the United States court can send to jail for the breach since the identified spy agents, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, who hired him, and the other hacker involved, Alexsey Belan, are all living in Russia.