A former employee of Russian Internet giant Yandex, the dominant search engine in that country, has been handed a two-year suspended jail sentence for stealing and trying to sell the source code for Yandex Search online.

The Russian newspaper Kommersant reports that Dmitry Korobov stole the code before quitting the company and trying to find buyers for the source code both online and offline.

Somewhat strangely, Korobov was only asking for around $25,000 for the stolen code and algorithms before being arrested.

The sale could have had some serious consequences for Yandex had it gone through, Kommersant reported. According to anonymous sources quoted by the paper, the theft would have had an impact of “billions of rubles, representing quite a significant part of Yandex’s value”.

Experts say it’s unlikely that Yandex’s rivals – Google and another Russian firm called Rambler – would have sought to buy the stolen code. However, the algorithms may have been useful for someone looking to perform advanced search engine optimization on certain websites.

A source at Yandex told Kommersant the code is “a key part of our company, it was related directly to Yandex’s search engine, which is the main source of the company’s income.”

“Our management took this incident very seriously,” the source added.

A second source told Kommersant that Korobov was hoping to use the money from the sale to fund his own startup. He went looking for a buyer on Russia’s darknet hacker forums, and this reportedly attracted the attention of the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB). Later, when Korobov went to meet a potential buyer for the code, he was arrested. It’s not clear from the report if the supposed “buyer” was an FSB agent or not.

Yandex currently owns around 57 percent of Russia’s search engine market. Google takes second place with 35 percent, but despite its best efforts over the years, it’s been unable to gain any deeper penetration into the country.

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