Yahoo hacker sentenced to five years in prison for massive breach
The Yahoo "hacker for hire" Karim Baratov, charged with helping Russian intelligence officers access compromised Yahoo email accounts, received a sentence of five years in prison, as well as a fine amounting to the forfeiture of all his remaining assets.
Baratov, a 23-year-old Kazakh native, was a Canadian national at the time of his arrest last year in Canada for his role in one of the largest breaches ever uncovered: the 2014 exposure of 500 million Yahoo email accounts.
According to the Justice Department's announcement of the sentencing, Baratov's function in the caper was to hack the webmail accounts of "individuals of interest to his co-conspirator who was working for the FSB" (Federal Security Service) and sending the account passwords to an FSB agent in exchange for money.
