Kaspersky Lab co-founder says FSB unit overseeing internet blocking has ‘no idea’ how networks work
Update: Natalya Kasperskaya said she had not met with the FSB. She said she had requested a meeting with the FSB’s Second Service but that no one from the agency had reached out to her. The co-founder of Kaspersky Lab stressed that a conversation “would have been worthwhile” — especially if rumors were true that this particular division now oversees internet blocking in Russia. “In Telegram channels and other online publications, I’ve practically been cast as the leader of ‘Russia’s digital resistance,’ which is rather amusing, because I have always sincerely considered myself a statist and a patriot,” Kasperskaya wrote in her Telegram channel.
Natalya Kasperskaya, co-founder of Kaspersky Lab and president of the InfoWatch group of companies, met in late April with officers of the FSB’s Second Service, which oversees internet blocking in Russia. The meeting focused on the ban on VPN services, the independent Russian business outlet The Bell reports. “Honestly, she’s completely fed up. With the blocking, with the constant confusion over rules that keep changing […] In short, she’s had it,” one of the outlet’s sources said.
The FSB’s Second Service (the Service for the Protection of the Constitutional Order and the Fight Against Terrorism) specializes in political cases. It has been linked to the poisonings of Alexey Navalny and Vladimir Kara-Murza. The head of the Second Service, General Alexei Sedov, worked at the KGB alongside Vladimir Putin.
A source in the IT industry told journalists that Kasperskaya had “gone hard” at the FSB’s Second Service: “She said: ‘Yeah, I met with them recently — they have absolutely no idea how networks, the internet, or technology work.’” Kasperskaya shared her account of the meeting with some members of the Association of Software Product Developers Otechestvennyy Soft (“Domestic Software”), which she leads. The association includes more than 300 companies.
Kasperskaya told members that the blocking had caused her company InfoWatch’s infrastructure to “break constantly, because the blocks are completely random.” “They keep losing access to updates, to foreign repositories… And tracking what’s broken today has worn them out,” one of The Bell’s sources said.
The second problem is access to software development tools: “Kasperskaya says almost all her developers work through a VPN, because access to many development tools is blocked from Russian IP addresses. So the FSB and Roskomnadzor’s war on VPNs is really not working for them right now.”
Any attempts to get the message across that blocking VPNs is actually a bad idea are being ignored by everyone — including Roskomnadzor and the Ministry of Digital Development. Kasperskaya says Roskomnadzor offered to add her corporate VPN’s IP addresses to the list of legal VPNs, but she refused. She says the company is already half a step away from sanctions — the last thing they need is to expose their VPN IP addresses so it becomes even easier to identify them and block access to repositories from the other side.
The Bell reported in mid-April that the FSB’s Second Service had taken over oversight of the Russian internet. One of the outlet’s sources said Kasperskaya had confirmed that “questions of blocking had indeed moved to the Second Service.” “Other services, she said, are horrified by this. The issue has been politicized and stripped of any technological grounding,” the source said. Previously, Russia’s IT sector had been overseen by the FSB’s Center for Information Security and its Scientific and Technical Service, whose staff the industry had considered technically competent, The Bell notes.
In early April, Natalya Kasperskaya entered into a public dispute with Roskomnadzor, accusing it of having “in its frenzy of fighting circumvention tools brought down half the services on Runet.” She made the remark in response to a large-scale outage on April 3, when many banking services in Russia went down for several hours.
“No, this is not an enemy strike or an attack by external actors or evil foreign hackers. This is our very own Roskomnadzor finally getting serious about fighting tunneling and traffic protection services, also known as VPNs,” Kasperskaya said. She soon apologized to Roskomnadzor for her “hasty conclusions,” saying she had spoken with Roskomnadzor head Andrei Lipov, who explained that the outage was related to Sberbank’s own services, not to the agency’s actions.
The Bell describes Natalya Kasperskaya as someone who has “long enjoyed the favor” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. She regularly participates in meetings with him, and he has “repeatedly listened” to her requests in the past. “But no one in the industry believes Kasperskaya will win against the FSB,” The Bell writes.
“So far it doesn’t look like Natalya Ivanovna’s efforts will have any effect at all. Yes, the President respects her and is willing to hear her out and back her on certain economic matters. But when it comes to security — and everything happening on Runet is apparently being explained to the President by the FSB as a matter of security — Natalya Ivanovna can’t compete with the security services in terms of authority,” The Bell quotes the founder of one IT company as saying.
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