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By Eric Lieberman
The U.S. Department of Justice (DoJ) is reportedly set to announce charges against four suspects for hacking Yahoo and breaching hundreds of millions of user accounts.
One of the alleged perpetrators lives in Canada, and the other three live in Russia, according to Bloomberg News. The accused man in Canada is more likely to be arrested because Russia and America don’t have an official agreement for extradition.
Yahoo announced in December that one billion user accounts were hacked two years ago, an incident separate from another cyber intrusion where roughly 500 million accounts were breached. It’s believed that both of the cases are respectively the two largest single cyber thefts ever, but it is not clear which breach the men are allegedly responsible for.
Yahoo was valued at $125 billion at its peak, but is now being sold for approximately 3.6 percent of what it was once worth after years in decline and a substantial price cut following the hacks. (RELATED: Yahoo Board Nukes CEO Marissa Mayer’s $2 Million Bonus)
The tech conglomerate was also forced to spend millions of dollars in legal and investigative costs related to the security breaches. Yahoo faces “43 putative consumer class action lawsuits, four stockholder derivative actions and one putative stockholder class action,” according to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
