Report: DOJ to issue indictments on Wednesday against suspects involved in Yahoo data breach

According to reports from Bloomberg and Reuters, the U.S. Justice Department plans to announce indictments on Wednesday against suspects involved in one the Yahoo data breaches. The indictments come after Yahoo suffered two massive hacks, one affecting 500 million users and another affecting 1 billion users.

The report claims that the suspects live in Russia and Canada, though it’s far more likely that the Canadian suspect will be charged than it is that the three Russian ones. This is due to the fact that the United States and Russia do not have an extradition treaty.

The U.S. is arresting one of the people in Canada as soon as Tuesday, the person said. Three of the people are currently in Russia, this person said. Representatives of Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo and the Justice Department declined to comment.

Bloomberg seems to explain that these suspects were the ones behind the Yahoo hack that revealed user data of 500 million users and originally occurred back in 2014. This breach was originally believed by Yahoo to be a “state sponsored act,” but it’s unclear at this point if that was the case.

Yahoo said recently that it hasn’t been able to identify the suspects involved in the 2013 breach that affected another one billion users.

The company hasn’t been able to identify the intrusion associated with the 2013 breach, according to a filing this month. Yahoo also has said it believes the thief in the 2014 hack was a “state-sponsored actor,” yet about the time it was revealed two people familiar with the matter said a link to a nation-state wasn’t iron-clad.

Yahoo’s security concerns have come as Yahoo is in the midst of being acquired by Verizon. In response to the security concerns, Verizon revealed last month that it was cutting $350 million from its acquisition price of the company, bringing the price down to $4.48 billion as of the latest filings.

Verizon’s acquisition of Yahoo is expected to close during the second quarter of this year. Though, Verizon has said that the data breaches may delay “some integration of Yahoo with Verizon after the closing.”