A former employee of Yandex, the Russian mogul of search engines in the former Soviet Union, has been convicted of stealing the source code for the site and selling it for $25,000 and 250,000 rubles — roughly the equivalent of $40,000 USD.

According to the Russian newspaper Kommersant, Dmitry Korobov purloined the code and some of the company's "key algorithms" by downloading them with a type of software nicknamed "Arcadia," which housed the coded information. Korobov then attempted to sell the codes to a friend and colleague who worked at the electronic retailer NIX. Kommersant also reported that the former Yandex employee attempted it hock it on the dark net.

The punchline? The price Dorobov was willing to sell it for was millions upon millions of rubles lower than its actual cost, which is estimated somewhere near the $15 million USD mark.

"He was not even aware of the real value of the stolen intellection [intellectual] property," an unidentified source told Kommersant, adding that Korobov planned to use the money for his own startup.

Despite Korobov's underselling — and the actual worth of the data — the market for the codes was small enough that it made identifying the culprit an easy process.

"The market is small, and it would've been easy to single out the thief," Aleksey Lukatskiy, an Internet security analyst who works at Cisco, told ARS Technica.

The breach comes a year after a corporate hack on the company: Russian cyberthieves accessed the email passwords to more that 1.26 million user accounts — 90 percent of which were active — in a large credential dump and posted to the website Bitcoin Security in September 2014.

Korobov has been issued a suspended sentence of two years in prison by the Tushino District Court of Moscow.

Via: ARS Technica

Photo: Alisher Hasanov | Flickr