![]() In December 2016, Yahoo went public with details of the breach and advised hundreds of millions of users to change their passwords. Thats all it took for hackers aligned with the Russian state security service to gain access to Yahoos network and potentially the email messages and. It wasn't until late August 2016 that the full scale of the breach began to become apparent and the FBI investigation significantly stepped up. So clinical was the attack that when Yahoo first approached the FBI in 2014, it went with worries that 26 accounts had been targeted by hackers. government workers, an employee of a Swiss Bitcoin wallet company and a U.S. Others belonged to Russian journalists, officials of states bordering Russia, U.S. The hacked users included an assistant to the deputy chairman of Russia, an officer in Russia's Ministry of Internal Affairs and a trainer working in Russia's Ministry of Sports. Of the roughly 500 million accounts they potentially had access to, they only generated cookies for about 6,500 accounts. ![]() Throughout the process, Belan and his colleague were clinical in their approach. Those cookies, which were generated many times throughout 20, gave the hackers free access to a user email account without the need for a password. Once the accounts had been identified, the hackers were able to use stolen cryptographic values called "nonces" to generate access cookies through a script that had been installed on a Yahoo server. Sometimes they were able to identify targets based on their recovery email address, and sometimes the email domain tipped them off that the account holder worked at a company or organization of interest. The account management tool didn't allow for simple text searches of user names, so instead the hackers turned to recovery email addresses. ![]() District Court endictment for four people accused of hacking Yahoo is seen against FBI wanted posters. It's those last two items that enabled Belan and fellow commercial hacker Karim Baratov to target and access the accounts of certain users requested by the Russian agents, Dmitry Dokuchaev and Igor Sushchin. The database contained names, phone numbers, password challenge questions and answers and, crucially, password recovery emails and a cryptographic value unique to each account. ![]()
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