Canadian suspect in Yahoo case pleads guilty

A 22-year-old Canadian man, known as Baratov, has pleaded guilty to hacking webmail accounts in a US court. He is one of the accused in the 2014 Yahoo hack case.

According to the US Department of Justice, Baratov along with other indictees, as of January 2014, “conspired to gain access to Yahoo’s servers and the contents of webmail accounts.” His specific role was to gain access to accounts in which the Russian FSB was interested. He then sold the passwords to one of the two FSB employees who are also among the accused. In addition, Baratov’s job was to access Google and Yandex webmail accounts, the ministry said in a statement.

Baratov has reached a so-called plea agreement and his sentence has yet to be determined in a hearing in February. He has confessed to commission hacking and access to more than 11,000 accounts between 2010 and 2017. He offered his services through Russian hacker forums. According to his statement, he would usually have approached his victims through targeted phishing emails, in which he impersonated the victim’s email provider, for example Google or Yandex. In this way, he obtained login details via fake login pages, which he then sold.

He has been charged with a total of 47 offenses, of which he has admitted 8, the ministry said. In August, the man said he was still innocent. His three Russian co-defendants, including the two FSB employees, are still at large in Russia, according to the ministry. According to Cyberscoop, Baratov was unaware that he was working with FSB agents, his lawyer said during the hearing. The charges against the four men were announced in March.