Hacker gets 5 years for major Yahoo breach

A Canadian computer hacker has been sentenced to five years in prison in connection with a massive security breach at Yahoo that federal agents say was directed by Russian government spies.

Karim Baratov was also fined $US250,000 by US judge Vince Chhabria.

Baratov pleaded guilty in November to nine felony hacking charges. He acknowledged hacking thousands of webmail accounts for seven years, ending with his arrest last year.

He charged customers to obtain another person's webmail passwords by tricking them into entering their credentials into a fake password reset page.

Prosecutors allege that the Russian security service hired the Kazakhstan-born Baratov to target email accounts using information obtained from the Yahoo hack.

His attorneys said Baratov did not know he was working for the Russian spy agency.