Two FSB officers and one Kaspersky Lab employee charged with treason

The head of the computer incidents investigation team at Kaspersky Lab Ruslan Stoyanov has been charged with treason in favor of the United States, said lawyer Ivan Pavlov in an interview with news agency Interfax on Wednesday.

Such charges have also been brought against Sergey Mikhaylov, the head of one of the departments of the FSB’s cybersecurity division, and his deputy Dmitry Dokuchaev. 

Pavlov said that he represents one of the defendants, though he did not indicate who it was.

In December 2016, FSB officers Sergey Mikhailov and his subordinate Dmitry Dokuchaev were detained on charges of treason. Head of the computer incidents investigation team at Kaspersky Lab Ruslan Stoyanov was also arrested. According to publication Rosbalt, Vladimir Anikeev, the alleged head of Russian hacker group Anonymous International, a.k.a. Shaltai Boltai, was the one who informed on the three individuals. It is unclear what exactly Anikeev, who has been held at Lefertovo detention center since December 2016, told the investigative team.

Earlier, publication Novaya Gazeta reported that the investigative team believes that the FSB officials gave US intelligence agencies information on the IP-addresses of devices involved in the hacker attacks against databases for election systems in Illinois and Arizona.

Earlier in January, newspaper Kommersant reported that 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 operating in the field of cybersecurity, possibly Kaspersky Lab. Kaspersky Lab told the newspaper that the case against Stoyanov was based on his activities before 2012, that is before he began working for the company.