Yandex Data Breach – Employee Caught Selling Access to User Accounts

Yandex N.V. is a Russian Dutch-domiciled multinational corporation providing Internet-related products and services including transportation, search and information services, eCommerce, navigation, mobile applications, and online advertising. They provide over 70 services.

Yandex is the popular leading search engine and E-mail provider in Russia. They announced that a data breach had been discovered during routine screening by Yandex’s security team.

An internal investigation revealed that an employee had been providing unauthorized access to users’ mailboxes for personal gain.

The company said, “The person was one of three system administrators with the essential access rights to provide technical support for the service”, Yandex said in a statement.

Therefore of his actions, 4,887 mailboxes were compromised. No payment details held by Yandex were compromised.

Yandex’s security team has already blocked unauthorized access to the compromised mailboxes. The company’s officials also contacted the mailbox owners to alert them about the breach and they have been informed of the need to change their account passwords.

Detailed Internal Investigation is in Progress

A thorough internal investigation of the incident is in progress, and Yandex will be making changes to administrative access procedures.

These revisions will facilitate to minimize the potential for individuals to compromise the security of user data in future.

The company stated that the breach was discovered during routine screening by Yandex’s security team.

It is said that there was no proof, to suggest that user payment data was accessed during the recent incident. It’s not clear when the breach occurred or when the employee began offering unauthorized access to third-parties.

As a result, the Russian company apologized to the users who have been affected by this incident. Yandex also has contacted law enforcement regarding the incident.

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