Man Indicted with Hacking Charges to help Russian Government Admits to Cyber-Crime

Karim Baratov, aged 22, described as "hacker-for-hire" ran a series of attacks in a scheme that compromised electronic mail accounts belonging to American government officials, journalists, one French transportation enterprise's employees, one American airline and one bitcoin wallet in Switzerland. Within a few instances, the scheme attacked the accounts belonging to the said entities' children and spouses as well.

According to San Francisco's federal prosecutors, beginning in 2014, certain hackers' syndicate doing service for FSB (Federal Security Service) of Russia, a law enforcement and intelligence agency, without authorization acquired admission into over 30m Yahoo accounts along with a number of Gmail accounts followed with stealing data related to over 500m Yahoo users.

According to United States DOJ, Baratov executed spear-phishing attacks so as for tricking victims in a way they would type in their accounts' log in particulars inside web-pages he crafted as looking being from the web-mail sources of the victims. Soon as he got the log in particulars, Baratov sent them to his customers. Theglobeandmail.com posted this online dated November 29, 2017.

United States law enforcement authorities, who gave Baratov the moniker "hacker-for-hire," state that within his plea agreement, the accused admitted to hacking over 11K web-mail accounts to aid FSB as well as other clients since 2010 till March 2017 when he was arrested.

During February, Baratov was legally charged. Along with him 3 other apparent co-defendants from Russia were also indicted. According to Brian Stretch, U.S Attorney, Baratov, who traded his services with government agents of Russia, is one copious crime lending hacker. The man stands convicted of distributing spear-phishing e-mails to specific individuals cunningly making them divulge their credentials which he would then send to intelligence agents of Russia. DOJ (Department of Justice) stated that the hosting service of the hacked accounts were Google and Russia-based Yandex.

In his plea agreement Baratov admitted to carrying out 8 counts of intense ID-theft and a single count of conniving towards infringing upon the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. His co-conspirators 43-yr-old Igor Sushchin, 33-yr-old Dmitry Dokuchaev and 29-yr-old Alexsey Belan have escaped though believably hiding in Russia.

» SPAMfighter News - 12/6/2017