Yandex Mail catches employee who sold data of nearly 5,000 users inboxes

Web search engine Yandex is one of the most popular sites in Russia, having indexed several important Russian websites as well as allowing access to services for free, just like its American competitor, Google. The search engine, which also provides a free webmail service, recently caught an employee selling access to user email accounts, according to reports.

The search engine has now begun informing each of the users who were affected by the employee’s actions - around 4,887 users’ mailboxes were compromised as a result of the unauthorised sale of information, according to ZDNet. These users are being asked to change their passwords, while the company reportedly claimed that there was no evidence to show that payment data of users was compromised as a result of the administrator’s unauthorised access.

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While the search company did not reveal who the employee was, it revealed that they found out what had happened while its internal security team conducted a routine screening, the report stated. The company has also secured the accounts that were compromised and the illegal logins provided by the employee have also been terminated.

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The employee who compromised over nearly five thousand user accounts was reportedly one of three systems administrators who had the required credentials to access the accounts due to their role of providing support for the company’s Yandex.Mail service, according to ZDNet. The company is also working on conducting an investigation into the breach and will likely modify the level of access to user data that administrators have, the report stated.