A
Russian court has handed down lengthy prison terms for two men convicted on
treason charges for allegedly sharing information about Russian cybercriminals
with U.S. law enforcement officials. The men — a former Russian cyber
intelligence official and an executive at Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab —
were reportedly prosecuted for their part in an investigation into Pavel Vrublevsky, a convicted cybercriminal who ran one of
the world’s biggest spam networks and was a major focus of my 2014 book, Spam Nation.
Sergei Mikhailov, formerly deputy chief
of Russia’s top anti-cybercrime unit, was sentenced today to 22 years in
prison. The court also levied a 14-year sentence against Ruslan Stoyanov,
a senior employee at Kaspersky Lab. Both men maintained their innocence
throughout the trial. Following their dramatic arrests in 2016, many news media
outlets reported that the men were suspected of having tipped off American
intelligence officials about those responsible for Russian hacking activities
tied to the 2016 U.S. presidential election.
That’s because two others arrested for treason at the same time — Mikhailov subordinates Georgi Fomchenkov and Dmitry Dokuchaev — were reported by Russian media to have helped the FBI investigate Russian servers linked to the 2016 hacking of the Democratic National Committee. The case against Fomchenkov and Dokuchaev has not yet gone to trial.
What exactly was revealed during the trial of Mikhailov and
Stoyanov is not clear, as the details surrounding it were classified. But
according to information, the most likely explanation for their prosecution
stemmed from a long-running grudge held by Pavel Vrublevsky,
a Russian businessman who ran a payment firm called ChronoPay and
for years paid most of the world’s top spammers and virus writers to pump
malware and hundreds of billions of junk emails into U.S. inboxes.
In 2013, Vrublevsky was convicted of hiring
his most-trusted spammer and malware writer to launch a crippling distributed
denial-of-service (DDoS) attack against one of his company’s chief competitors.
Prior to Vrublevsky’s conviction, massive amounts of files and
emails were taken from Vrublevsky’s company and shared with this author. Those
included spreadsheets chock full of bank account details tied to some of the
world’s most active cybercriminals, and to a vast network of shell corporations
created by Vrublevsky and his co-workers to help launder the proceeds from
their various online pharmacy, spam and fake antivirus operations.
In a
telephone interview with this author in 2011, Vrublevsky said he was convinced
that Mikhailov was taking information gathered by Russian government cybercrime
investigators and feeding it to U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.
Vrublevsky told me then that if ever he could prove for certain Mikhailov was
involved in leaking incriminating data on ChronoPay, he would have someone
“tear him a new asshole.”
An email that
Vrublevsky wrote to a ChronoPay employee in 2010 eerily presages the arrests of
Mikhailov and Stoyanov, voicing Vrublevsky’s suspicion that the two were
closely involved in leaking ChronoPay emails and documents that were seized by
Mikhailov’s own division. A copy of that email is shown in Russian in the
screen shot below.
Best Regards ,
Web Admin
LATVIK SECURE
LATVIK TECHNOLOGIES ™
www.latvikhost.com | https://latviksecure.blogspot.com 
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