A leading Russian cybersecurity director has been charged with high treason.
Until Wednesday, Ilya Sachkov was the Russian director of Group-IB, a top cybersecurity company. He was a rising star. But Vladimir Putin’s FSB domestic security service now accuses Sachkov of sharing protected information with Western law enforcement services.
If Sachkov did cooperate with Western law enforcement (the nature and very question of cooperation is unclear), he deserves a medal, not punishment.
TASS reports FSB sources as saying Sachkov denies he took actions to undermine Russian security. That bears note.
Because as Moskovskij Komsomolets observes, Sachkov’s real crime appears to have been his opposition to cybercriminality. The newspaper says that Sachkov used a 2020 meeting with Prime Minister Mikhail Mishustin to warn that Russia’s lax attitude toward cybercriminals was damaging its interests. It quotes Sachkov as saying:
Yakubets is a hacker under U.S. indictment for leading a hacking cartel that stole tens of millions of dollars from various U.S. banks and institutions. But Sachkov is absolutely correct in saying that Yakubets lives an open life of luxury. His freedom is not the result of incompetent Russian policing. Rather, I understand that Yakubets is free because he assists Russian cyberintelligence activities and gives FSB patronage networks a nice cut of his ill-gotten cash.
In turn, whatever their factual grounding (or absence thereof), the charges against Sachkov evince just how delusional the Biden administration has been in its dialogue with the Kremlin on countering cybercrime.
Biden should be holding the Kremlin to account for its active facilitation of ransomware and other cybercriminal activity.
