14 DAY TRIAL // Just before Christmas, Dmitriy Korobov, a former Yandex employee, received a two-year suspended sentence, after being caught trying to sell his company's search engine algorithm on the Dark Web, multiple Russian news agencies report.
FSB (Federal Security Service) agents arrested Mr. Korobow in March this year, after he put up several ads online, on underground hacking forums, selling Arcadia, an "application from Yandex's backend."
Mr. Korobov was ready to deliver his goods for the price of $25,000 and 250,000 Russian rubles (another $3,500).
Mr. Korobov stole Yandex's search ranking algorithm
At the time he put up the ad, Mr. Korobov was still a Yandex employee and did not know that the code he stole was actually Yandex's search engine algorithm, used to rank search results on the main Yandex.ru website, Russia's own version of Google.
Because of his lack of experience dealing with the Dark Web, Russian FSB agents were quickly alerted by his actions. They got in contact with Mr. Korobov and set up a meeting to discuss the transaction, during which the suspect was arrested.
To ease tensions before the encounter and convince the suspect to meet, FSB agents posed as representatives of Enterprise Nix, a company where one of Mr. Korobov's friends worked at.
The suspect was accused of illegal possession and distribution of commercial secrets, and the Tushinsky District Court of Moscow passed a two-year suspended sentence on him (no actual jail time).
Yandex's source code was worth millions of dollars
Russian online portal Kommersant cites a source inside Yandex that values the stolen algorithm at "billions of rubles" (1 billion Russian ruble = $1,375 million).
"This is software is a key part of our company, that is, this software is directly related to the 'Yandex' search engine, which is the main source of revenue, and therefore our management takes this incident very seriously," Anastasia Adilova, a member of Yandex's legal department, said in court.
Currently, Yandex has a market share of 57% inside Russia's borders, almost double the one Google has.
Mr. Korobov was planning to start his own startup with the money from the sale.