Nevada gaming official' Yahoo account was among Russian hacker's targets

News surfaced Monday of an indictment unsealed last week by US federal prosecutors charging two Russian intelligence officers and two other hackers in a conspiracy to illegally access Yahoo’s network and use some of that stolen information to access a number of Yahoo accounts, including those belonging to a gaming official, business executives, journalists and U.S. and foreign officials.

The Nevada Independent reported that the conspiracy gained access to possibly half a billion Yahoo accounts in 2014, according to the document, which names Dmitry Aleksandrovich Dokuchaev, a 33-year-old agent with Russia’s Federal Security Service, who accessed an account belonging to an unnamed “Nevada gaming official” on March 30, 2016.

Other accounts accessed by the hackers include those belonging to employees of a Swiss bitcoin wallet and banking firm, a sales manager at a major U.S. financial company and a Shanghai-based managing director of a U.S. private equity firm.

In the case of the Nevada gaming official, it was apparently a fruitless raid by the hackers. Nevada Gaming Control Board chairman AG Burnett told The Nevada Independent, the account was a personal one opened by one of the Board’s 400 employees (whom Burnett declined to identify), and that he (or she) had advised the Board that there had been nothing work-related on it.

Burnett emphasised that the Board’s email accounts and servers were not involved in the hack and that all systems remain protected and secure. “Nothing the Gaming Control Board does was touched or affected,” the chairman said.

The employee had since reset the password on the Yahoo account.

The unsealed indictment marks the first time that Russian FSB officials have been indicted on cybercrime charges in the United States, Jack Bennett, special agent in charge of the FBI’s San Francisco office, told the New York Times, which first noted the Nevada connection.

The four defendants face 47 criminal charges, among them computer hacking, economic espionage and other criminal offences.