US Justice Dpt. accuses Russian agents of directing Yahoo hack in 2014; Kremlin denies any involvement

Yesterday, as reported by The New York Times, the Justice Department on Wednesday charged two Russian intelligence officers with directing a sweeping criminal conspiracy that broke into 500 million Yahoo accounts in 2014.

The Russian government then used the information it obtained from the intelligence officers and two others named in the indictment — a Russian hacker and a Kazakh national living in Canada — to focus on foreign officials, business executives and journalists, federal prosecutors said. The targets included numerous financial executives, executives at an American cloud computing company, an airline official and even a casino regulator in Nevada.

This morning Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov denied any involvement of “any Russian government organization, including [secret service] FSB, in any illegal activity in the cyberspace.” He called for international cooperation in the field of cybersecurity.