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Treason-trial in Russia accidently exposes link between FSB and russian cybercriminals.
TL;DR
- A russian IT-security expert is on trial for treason for passing confidential information to an american colleague.
- The American offered herself as witness, but Russia didn't want to hear her testimony.
- The trial is based on the witness-testimony of a famous russian cybercriminal who went to jail because of that expert.
- The expert had previously criticized the FSB-practice of protecting russian cybercriminals in exchange for their services.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/kremlin-accused-her-of-being-a-us-spy-she-offered-to-go-to-moscow?ref=home
Ruslan Stoyanov is a one-time cybercop who went on to head the computer incidents investigation team at the cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab. He stood trial with Col. Sergei Mikhailov, who was second in command in the cybercrime division of Russia’s federal security service, the FSB
...
The men are accused of passing confidential material from a 2010 cybercrime and spam investigation to an analyst at a U.S. security firm. But the trial ended without the court hearing from a key figure in the prosecution’s theory: the analyst herself, who says the Russian military appears to be on the verge of convicting Stoyanov for treason he didn’t commit.
“I formally requested to testify, and they said no,” said Kimberly Zenz, a veteran cybercrime threat analyst who was caught up in the Russian intrigue while working for Verisign’s iDefense threat intelligence division. “You’d think the opportunity to interrogate a ‘spy’ would be exciting for them, but they don’t even bother to pretend.”
...
the defendants are on trial because eight years ago they allegedly shared confidential documents about a convicted Russian cybercriminal with an American colleague.
...
The treason charges are rooted in allegations first leveled against Stoyanov and other defendants in 2010 by one of the Russian cybercriminals they were tracking: Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the credit card payment processor ChronoPay.
Vrublevsky is notorious for, among other things, allegedly running a black market pharmaceutical business that hired hackers and spammers to send billions of marketing emails. His misadventures have been chronicled in some detail over the years by independent journalist Brian Krebs, who wrote a book about Vrublevsky called Spam Nation.
...
Vrublevsky believes that defendant Sergey Mikhaylov, while serving as the deputy chief of the FSB’s anti-cybercrime unit, routinely passed confidential information from the FSB’s ChronoPay probe to the corporate cybercrime analyst Kimberly Zenz.
...
The information passed to Zenz, he said, informed a series of damning iDefense reports that Zenz wrote about the Russian cybercrime landscape in general, and ChronoPay and Vrublevsky in particular.
...
To that stew of alleged information-sharing and suspicious street addresses, prosecutors have sprinkled new specifics of their own atop Vrublevsky’s original claims, according to press reports and accounts of people involved in the trial. They charge that the defendants didn’t just share information with Zenz and possibly other Americans, but that they passed along government documents, for which they were collectively paid an astounding $10 million.
...
Zenz wrote the court that she wanted to testify at the trial—a gutsy move for an American now regarded a cunning spymaster by the Russian government. “I requested the option to testify at the embassy here because it’s a lot safer and you’re allowed to do that in the court system there,” she said. “But if I had to, I’d go. I had a big fight with my husband over it.”
To her surprise, the military judges ignored the letter, and she says they also rejected a request from Stoyanov’s lawyer to call Zenz as a witness. “Instead, the main witness is a Russian criminal convicted of breaking Russian laws in Russia, and coincidentally the accused happen to be the people who put him in jail for those crimes,” she said.
...
Stoyanov himself has cast the prosecution as payback, because he’d been stirring up trouble by criticizing the FSB’s practice of granting effective immunity to hackers willing to do some espionage on the side. “The essence of the deal is that the state gets access to the technologies and information of ‘cyberthieves,’ in exchange for allowing them to steal abroad with impunity,” he wrote in a letter from jail made public in 2017.
...
And he can’t explain why the conspiracy he’s been complaining about since 2010 is suddenly being taken so seriously by the Russian government.
“Nobody knows why they took so long,” Vrublevsky said. “It’s the biggest mystery of them all.”
...
The men are accused of passing confidential material from a 2010 cybercrime and spam investigation to an analyst at a U.S. security firm. But the trial ended without the court hearing from a key figure in the prosecution’s theory: the analyst herself, who says the Russian military appears to be on the verge of convicting Stoyanov for treason he didn’t commit.
“I formally requested to testify, and they said no,” said Kimberly Zenz, a veteran cybercrime threat analyst who was caught up in the Russian intrigue while working for Verisign’s iDefense threat intelligence division. “You’d think the opportunity to interrogate a ‘spy’ would be exciting for them, but they don’t even bother to pretend.”
...
the defendants are on trial because eight years ago they allegedly shared confidential documents about a convicted Russian cybercriminal with an American colleague.
...
The treason charges are rooted in allegations first leveled against Stoyanov and other defendants in 2010 by one of the Russian cybercriminals they were tracking: Pavel Vrublevsky, founder of the credit card payment processor ChronoPay.
Vrublevsky is notorious for, among other things, allegedly running a black market pharmaceutical business that hired hackers and spammers to send billions of marketing emails. His misadventures have been chronicled in some detail over the years by independent journalist Brian Krebs, who wrote a book about Vrublevsky called Spam Nation.
...
Vrublevsky believes that defendant Sergey Mikhaylov, while serving as the deputy chief of the FSB’s anti-cybercrime unit, routinely passed confidential information from the FSB’s ChronoPay probe to the corporate cybercrime analyst Kimberly Zenz.
...
The information passed to Zenz, he said, informed a series of damning iDefense reports that Zenz wrote about the Russian cybercrime landscape in general, and ChronoPay and Vrublevsky in particular.
...
To that stew of alleged information-sharing and suspicious street addresses, prosecutors have sprinkled new specifics of their own atop Vrublevsky’s original claims, according to press reports and accounts of people involved in the trial. They charge that the defendants didn’t just share information with Zenz and possibly other Americans, but that they passed along government documents, for which they were collectively paid an astounding $10 million.
...
Zenz wrote the court that she wanted to testify at the trial—a gutsy move for an American now regarded a cunning spymaster by the Russian government. “I requested the option to testify at the embassy here because it’s a lot safer and you’re allowed to do that in the court system there,” she said. “But if I had to, I’d go. I had a big fight with my husband over it.”
To her surprise, the military judges ignored the letter, and she says they also rejected a request from Stoyanov’s lawyer to call Zenz as a witness. “Instead, the main witness is a Russian criminal convicted of breaking Russian laws in Russia, and coincidentally the accused happen to be the people who put him in jail for those crimes,” she said.
...
Stoyanov himself has cast the prosecution as payback, because he’d been stirring up trouble by criticizing the FSB’s practice of granting effective immunity to hackers willing to do some espionage on the side. “The essence of the deal is that the state gets access to the technologies and information of ‘cyberthieves,’ in exchange for allowing them to steal abroad with impunity,” he wrote in a letter from jail made public in 2017.
...
And he can’t explain why the conspiracy he’s been complaining about since 2010 is suddenly being taken so seriously by the Russian government.
“Nobody knows why they took so long,” Vrublevsky said. “It’s the biggest mystery of them all.”