Head of Kaspersky Lab department arrested for treason

The head of the computer incidents investigation team at Kaspersky Lab Ruslan Stoyanov has been arrested for treason, reported newspaper Kommersant on Wednesday, citing unnamed sources.

Kaspersky Lab confirmed news of Stoyanov’s arrest, stating that he was been at Lefertovo prison since December 2016. The company stated that Stoyanov was being investigated as a private citizen and that there was no case against the company itself.

Kommersant’s sources indicated that Stoyanov’s arrest is tied to an investigation into the activity of Sergey Mikhaylov, the head of one of the departments of the FSB’s cybersecurity division. Mikhaylov has also been arrested.

The investigative team maintains that an employee of the FSB’s cybersecurity division (it is unclear whether the employee in question is Mikhaylov) received money from a foreign company through a Russian-based intermediary legal entity operating in the field of cybersecurity.

Founder of online payment platform Pavel Vrublevsky told Kommersant that Mikhaylov “in many regards informally determines the policies of the entire cybersecurity industry and of Internet commerce. As a result, his arrest may have repercussions on the cybersecurity and Internet commerce markets.

Kaspersky Lab has confirmed that the case against Stoyanov is based on his activities before 2012, that is before he began working for the company.

Earlier in January, Kommersant reported that the head of the FSB’s Information Security Center Andrei Gerasimov could soon be dismissed. Gerasimov’s allegedly impending dismissal, according to the publication, was related to an investigation of one of his deputies. The center was then being investigated over its relations with commercial companies specializing in cybercrimes. Amongst these companies were Kaspersky Lab and Group-IB.