One of the alleged perpetrators involved in the massive Yahoo hack that compromised as many as 500 million user accounts purported to be a luxury car aficionado and claimed to have made his first million at the tender age of 15.
According to a federal indictment, 22-year-old Karim Baratov—a Canadian citizen born in Kazakhstan — was used by Russian intelligence officers to gain “access to individual user accounts at Google and other providers (but not Yahoo)” and paid a bounty for providing them with the account passwords. The information was then allegedly used to hack into the email accounts of various political and business leaders in Russia and the United States.
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Baratov was arrested in Hamilton, Ontario on Tuesday, the same day U.S. officials indicted two Russian spies and Alexsay Belan, a notorious cybercriminal, who has been wanted for more than four years, and has been arrested before.
But Baratov didn’t have the same kind of public profile.
According to what appears to be his Facebook page, Baratov lives in Ancaster, Ontario—about a 10-minute drive from Hamilton—and is from Moscow. The photo of him provided in the indictment document appears to match those on his Facebook page. His profile image features him leaning against a black Mercedes and an Aston Martin. “Darth Vader & Storm Trooper combo,” he wrote in one caption. Other social media accounts appearing to belong to him show similar images.
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