Russian spies and cybercrime, FBI warrants and Interpol, treason and luxury cars. The details surrounding last week’s indictment of four men in connection with a massive hacking ring are the stuff of paperback spy novels.The Russian Federal Security Service, successor to the KGB, recruited wanted cybercriminals who embarked on a prolific hacking scheme that breached about 500 million Yahoo email accounts and targeted diplomats, bureaucrats, journalists and business executives for political and financial gain, according to the U.S. indictment. None of the charges have been proven in court. Mixed into the fray is a baby-faced Canadian of Kazakh origins, just 19 years old at the scheme’s outset, with an ostentatious lifestyle carefully documented in boastful social media posts.But what do we know of the lives of Russian intelligence officers Igor Sushchin and Dmitry Dokuchaev, Latvian-born hacker Alexsey Belan and 22-year-old Ontario resident Karim Baratov. In the mid-2000s, Dokuchaev was a well-known hacker, operating under the pseudonym “Forb,” according to Russian media reports. In a 2004 interview with a Moscow-based newspaper, Forb, then about 20 years old, claimed to have hacked U.S. government websites and made a significant amount of money from credit card fraud. Journalists in Russia have reported that the Federal Security Service (known by its Russian abbreviation, FSB) threatened to jail Dokuchaev for credit card scams unless he went to work for their Centre for Information Security.Like Dokuchaev, Belan gained notoriety as a young hacker with U.S. targets in his sights.The FBI alleges that, between January 2012 and April 2013, Belan breached the computer networks of three major American e-commerce businesses, stealing their user databases in order to sell them. On Sept. 12, 2012, a U.S. federal court in Las Vegas issued a warrant for Belan’s arrest on charges of aggravated identity theft, obtaining information from a p ...
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