Karim Baratov (a.k.a Karim Taloverov, a.k.a Karim Akehmet Tokbergenov), a Kazakhstan-born 23-year-old Canadian citizen who was pleaded guilty last year for his role in helping Russian government spies hack into email accounts of Yahoo users and other services which lead to the compromise of 500M accounts has been sentenced to 5 years in prison.
Additional to his sentence in prison He was also ordered to pay a fine of $250,000 by the federal judge in San Francisco.
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According to the court documents, Baratov managed to crack more than 11,000 email accounts in both Russia as well as the United States before the Toronto Police Department caught him.
He was hacking Accounts since Seven years for Money. As mentioned in his plea Baratov admitted to hacking thousands of webmail accounts of individuals for seven years and send those accounts passwords to Russian spy Dokuchaev in exchange for money.
His role was to “hack webmail accounts of individuals of interest to the FSB,”
Until His Arrest in March 2017 and in November, Baratov pleaded guilty to a total of nine counts, including one count of conspiring to violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and eight counts of aggravated identity theft.
The Two main Assets that he obtained for hacking were the
- Yahoo’s User Database (UDB) – a database containing personal information about all Yahoo users.
- The Account Management Tool – an administrative tool used to make alterations to the targeted accounts, including their passwords.
Belan then used the file transfer protocol (FTP) to download the Yahoo’s UDB, which included password recovery emails and cryptographic values unique to each Yahoo account.
But as the sentence is concerned the US Attorney Alex Tse wanted to make it wide clear that Nation sponsored hacking will have devastating effects on the ones involved and would be considered strictly.
the US attorney quoted:
“Hackers such as Baratov ply their trade without regard for the criminal objectives of the people who hire and pay them. These hackers are not minor players; they are a critical tool used by criminals to obtain and exploit personal information illegally. In sentencing Baratov to five years in prison, the Court sent a clear message to hackers that participating in cyber attacks sponsored by nation states will result in significant consequences”
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- Image used above taken from google.
- Karim Baratov shown above is taken from a photo uploaded to social media. (Karim Baratov/Facebook)
