Russia’s reliance on cybercriminals has a ‘silver lining,’ says top DOJ lawyer

A top Justice Department official says there is a “silver lining” in the fact that Russia’s Federal Security Service was reliant on a pair of alleged cybercriminals to hack into Yahoo and collect information. Two contractors with cybercrime connections were among four individuals indicted in March by the Justice Department in a massive data breach that occurred at Yahoo in 2014. The other two were officers from FSB, which is one of Russia’s top intelligence agencies. Such a “blended threat” can create openings for investigators, said Adam Hickey, deputy assistant attorney general for the National Security Division. “It’s an advantage to us because those are individuals that are more willing to travel, they are more likely to be less op-sec savvy in certain respects compared to an intelligence officer and that matters because apprehending them can … give us that human intelligence into the state-sponsored hacking,” Hickey said. “That can be very, very valuable in […]

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