Yandex Says It Caught an Employee Selling Access to User Email Accounts for Personal Gains, and is in Process of Notifying 4,887 Affected Mailbox Owners (Yandexcimpanuzdnet)

Yandexcimpanuzdnet: Yandex, the Russian internet technology company, has reportedly caught one of its own employees selling access to user email accounts for personal gains. The employee was found out through the company’s own internal investigations, and is said to have sold 1.3 million breach accounts so far.

The company has revealed that this person is a senior level programmer and had privileged access to its databases. The company has said that this person was selling access to about 4,887 user accounts and the employee gathered the usernames and passwords via a Yandex’s automatic feedback form.

The company has started notifying those users whose accounts have been compromised by this programmer. Yandexcimpanuzdnet is also planning to offer users a one-year premium subscription for free as an apology for this breach, but will soon stop doing it after having a word with its lawyers.

This is happening in a global internet world, but interestingly, the Russian government is howling against Yandex’s actions. The Russian telecom and internet watchdog Roskomnadzor has ordered Yandex to shut down the company’s marketing subscription programme during this investigation. Roskomnadzor has also repeatedly said that Yandex is technically violating Russian laws by allowing this employee to sell access to user accounts.

Yandex has been working on improving its security measures and recently revealed that the company’s IT infrastructure is incredibly robust, but the news of its own employee selling access to user email accounts have come as a shock to most users.

Also Yandex has not mentioned anything about the number of user accounts that were compromised by this employee, so users can only guess how many of them have been affected.

The company has said that it is investigating the matter further and if found guilty, the programmer will be fired from Yandex.