Two Russian intelligence agents who were supposed to help Americans hunt for hackers instead directed a sweeping criminal conspiracy that broke into 500 million Yahoo accounts in 2014, the Justice Department charged on Wednesday.The Russian government then used the information they obtained to focus on foreign officials, business executives and journalists, federal prosecutors said. The targets included numerous financial executives, executives at an American cloud computing company, an airline official and even a casino regulator in Nevada.The hackers also used the Yahoo data to send spam and steal credit card and gift card information. The attackers also sought to break into at least 50 Google accounts, including those of Russian officials and employees of a Russian cybersecurity firm.On Wednesday, prosecutors unsealed an indictment containing 47 criminal charges against the two agents of Russia’s Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., as well as two outside hackers with whom they worked with on the scheme, one of the largest known thefts of data from a private corporation.This is the first time officials of Russia’s F.S.B. have been indicted on cybercrime charges in the United States, said Jack Bennett, special agent in charge of the F.B.I.’s San Francisco office. Yahoo worked with the F.B.I. on the investigation for two years, he said.The indictment underscored the utter lack of cooperation between the American and Russian authorities on criminal breaches. One of the outside hackers, a Russian named Alexsey Belan, had been indicted twice before for three intrusions into American e-commerce companies and had been arrested in Europe, but escaped to Russia before he could be extradited. Prosecutors said they received no response to their requests to the Russian government to turn over Mr. Belan to the American authorities.
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