ASTANA. March 16 (Interfax) - The Kazakh Foreign Ministry has confirmed that Karim Baratov, who has been charged with carrying out cyber attacks on Yahoo websites, is not a citizen of Kazakhstan and changed his citizenship six years ago.
"Karim Baratov, who has been named by a number of media outlets as one implicated in a case dealing with the heist of Yahoo computer networks, is not a citizen of Kazakhstan. He underwent the formal procedure of renouncing Kazakh citizenship in 2011 in line with the republic's legislation," the ministry said on its Twitter page.
The Associated Press reported on Wednesday, citing its own source, that the U.S. Justice Department had charged two employees of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) and two hired hackers with involvement in a 2014 cyber attack on the Yahoo portal. The Washington Post, for its part, reported that the charges brought against these people included hacking, wire fraud, trade secret theft and economic espionage.
The newspaper said one of the hackers, Baratov, had been arrested in Canada on Tuesday. Baratov was born in Kazakhstan but is now a citizen of Canada.