Two Russian spies and two criminal hackers have been charged by the Department of Justice. The four were prosecuted because of the 500 million Yahoo user accounts that were hacked in 2014.
Two of them are members of the Russian Intelligence agency FSB officers Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, and two hackers hired.
Reuters reported that the Russians were charged with hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage.
Sushchin and Dokuchaev were arrested in Russia earlier this year in December and January charged with treason, and passing secrets onto the CIA.
The other two men being charged are Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov.
Alexsey Belan is listed on the most-wanted cyber criminals and was one of the hackers included as a reason for the economic sanctions on Moscow.
The economic sanctions were caused by the Obama administration before he left office. He alleged that Russia meddled in the 2016 election.
However, there was no evidence that Belan was responsible for the DNC hack.
The DOJ said that FSB officer defendants, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin, protected, directed, facilitated and paid criminal hackers to collect information through computer intrusions in the U.S. and elsewhere.
The DOJ also said that they worked with co-defendants Alexsey Belan and Karim Baratov to obtain access to the email accounts.
The incident is historic in a number of ways, one being that the U.S. has never brought cyber charges against any Russian government official.
The Yahoo hack was the largest cyber-crime case that the U.S. government has ever experienced against a foreign country.
It is estimated that 500 million Yahoo affected. The company later made an announcement that a second breach had taken place and affected 1 billion users,
The acting Assistant Attorney General McCord said that the criminal case serves as the FBI’s point of contact with Russia on cybercrime issues.
The FBI and the DOJ have shown that hackers around the world can be caught and held accountable for their actions.
Wew