How much is now "Yandex"? History of one sale

Photo: Gleb Shchelkunov / Kommersant



The other day in Moscow, the former Yandex employee Dmitry Korobov was convicted. The case turned out to be quite interesting - Korobov tried to sell the source code and algorithms of the company's main service, Yandex.Search. At the same time, the former employee estimated the source code quite inexpensively - $ 25 thousand and 250 thousand rubles, respectively, Kommersant writes . The money raised from the sale, Korobov wanted to spend on creating his own startup.



At the time of the transaction, the unlucky merchant was arrested by employees of the UFSB of Russia in Moscow and the Moscow Region. For Yandex, everything ended well, since the leakage of the source code could have resulted in millions of losses, a large number of court proceedings and, as a result, a fall in capitalization.



The case was considered by the Tushinsky District Court of Moscow. Korobov held under Article 3 of Art. 183 of the Criminal Code (illegal receipt and disclosure of information constituting a trade secret). As stated in the court, while still being an employee of Yandex, the accused “copied from the Yandex server the Arkady software containing the source code and algorithms of the Yandex search system, for which the trade secret mode was set, to a removable media for the purpose of subsequent transfer to third parties. "

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Experts have estimated the source code in “billions of rubles, which, in fact, represents a significant part of the cost of“ Yandex ”, since the search engine is the company's main service”. Anastasia Adilova, a lawyer at Yandex, said in court: “This is about software, which is a key part of our company, that is, this software was directly related to the Yandex search system, which is the main source of revenue for the company, and therefore our the management took the incident very seriously. ”



In search of buyers for his product, Korobov visited hacker forums, and also tried to propose the source codes of Yandex.Search of the company NIKS Enterprise LLC (works under the NIKS-Computer Supermarket brand). As a confirmation of the seriousness of intentions, the ex-employee of “Yandex” sent part of the search engine code to potential buyers. At one of the hacker forums, the FSB officers noticed the seller. At the time of the transfer of stolen intellectual property, the attacker was detained by law enforcers.



The court found Dmitry Korobov guilty and sentenced him to two years of probation.



According to a source familiar with the case materials, the seller did not even realize the real value of his goods. But buyers, if they were found, could receive huge benefits in promoting their resources. “Knowing the algorithm, they could ensure that their sites always fall into the first lines of search results, which in turn increases the number of potential customers,” said Cisco Internet Security Consultant Alexey Lukatsky.



Yandex could have huge financial and reputational losses in the event of a real leak of the source code. “Foreign investors probably would have reacted negatively to the code’s leakage, which could lower Yandex’s quotes on the NASDAQ by a few percentage points,” said Sergei Libin, analyst at Raiffeisenbank.