DOJ to formally charge suspects in Yahoo hack: reports

The Justice Department will charge four suspects accused of carrying out a massive online breach of hundreds of millions of Yahoo accounts, according to reports.

Three of the suspects are said to be in Russia, though it is not clear whether the hacking campaign was associated with the Kremlin. The other suspect is believed to be in Canada, Bloomberg reported.

Yahoo has been the target of two large-scale cyberattacks in recent years. In September, the company announced that about 500 million accounts had been breached in 2014, and three months later, in December, it revealed that about 1 billion accounts had been targeted in a 2013 attack.

{mosads}The revelations imperiled the sale of Yahoo’s web assets to Verizon.

The Justice Department and the FBI’s field office in San Francisco have scheduled press conferences for Wednesday, CNN reports, though they have not said what they plan to discuss.

The Russian government is suspected by the U.S. intelligence community to be behind a hacking and influence campaign to interfere in the 2016 presidential election in favor of President Trump.