First, hire a hacker: how Russian agents stole data from 500 million Yahoo accounts, according to US

It was June 2013, and US law enforcement thought they were finally getting their hands on a slippery target: Russian hacker Alexsey Belan, indicted in Nevada and California for computer intrusions at three US e-commerce companies, had been arrested in Europe.

Instead, US authorities say, Belan escaped to Russia, where the charges didn’t hamper his job prospects. Rather than handing Belan over to the US, Russia’s Federal Security Service (FSB) allegedly enlisted the man to help the agency hack into American Internet companies, including Yahoo! Inc.

The alleged conspiracy, laid out in an indictment in Federal Court in San Francisco, reveals the internal workings of Russia’s state cyber-spying regime, implicated in alleged attempts to influence the US election last year. Increasingly, it’s a system that capitalises on a vast and talented pool of Russian-speaking cyber criminals, blurring the lines between profit and intelligence gathering.

“We believe that their technical capabilities are not where they’re purported to be and they’re using criminal hackers,” said Jack Bennett, the San Francisco Division Special Agent in Charge of the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s San Francisco office. He spoke at a press conference on Wednesday.