RUSSIA IS RECRUITING THE FBI’S MOST-WANTED HACKERS

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Alexsey Belan and Evgeniy Bogachev, both Russian nationals, are on the FBI’s most-wanted list for cyber crimes. Both have been indicted in the U.S. on charges ranging from identity theft to bank fraud. But when the U.S. asked Moscow to detain them, it seems to have recruited them instead.

The Justice Department on Wednesday named Belan as one of four men who stole 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014. Two of the other men named were Russian intelligence agents, who are accused of recruiting Belan after the U.S. put out an international notice for his arrest in 2013.

“Instead of acting on the U.S. government’s Red Notice and detaining Belan after his return, Dokuchaev and Sushchin [the Russian intelligence agents] subsequently used him to gain unauthorized access to Yahoo’s network,” reads the Justice Department’s announcement.

Bogachev isn’t named in that indictment, but three days before it was announced, The New York Times reported he had a similar relationship with Russian intelligence. Rather than detaining Bogachev, the Russian government appears to have taken advantage of his vast network of malware-infected computers to spy on U.S. companies and agencies.

Before it became apparent Belan and Bogachev were colluding with Russian intelligence, both had racked up many criminal charges in the U.S. Belan had been charged with data theft in Las Vegas in 2012 and with computer fraud in San Francisco in 2013, according to the FBI. Bogachev had been charged with an even longer list of crimes, including racketeering and bank fraud, and the FBI issued a $3 million bounty for his capture in 2015.

http://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2017/03/russia-recruiting-fbis-most-wanted-hackers/136257/?oref=NextgovFB