A Moscow court sentenced the founder of Russia’s top cybersecurity firm to 14 years in prison for treason on Wednesday.
(Bloomberg) — A Moscow court sentenced the founder of Russia’s top cybersecurity firm to 14 years in prison for treason on Wednesday.
Ilya Sachkov, 37, who’d built up Group-IB into a security business that expanded into Europe, Asia and the Middle East, was ordered to serve the sentence at a strict-regime prison colony, state-run Tass news service reported. His lawyer, Sergei Afanasyev, told Bloomberg News that Sachkov, who was detained in September 2021 and denied wrongdoing, will appeal the conviction.
While the charges against him have never been made public because of secrecy surrounding treason trials in Russia, Sachkov was alleged to have given the US government information regarding a hacking team in Moscow’s GRU military intelligence service — dubbed “Fancy Bear” by US cybersecurity companies — and its efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election, according to people familiar with the matter.
It’s unclear if those accusations formed part of the official count, and Russian media has reported that the charges relate to a separate incident from 2014. In an interview with Forbes published in May last year, Sachkov accused unnamed people whose activities his cybersecurity investigations were “seriously obstructing” of being behind his prosecution.
Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2017 suggested that “patriotically-minded” Russians could have been involved in hacking during foreign elections, while repeating past denials that Moscow had anything to do with cyberattacks on the campaign of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic contender defeated by Donald Trump in the 2016 election. Clinton has blamed her defeat partly on Russian interference.
Jailed Russian Cyber CEO Linked to 2016 Election Hack Leaks
One reason Sachkov may have been targeted is that he provided information to Western agencies about Vladislav Klyushin, the founder of another Russian cybersecurity company with Kremlin ties, three people familiar with the matter said soon after his detention.
Klyushin, who was extradited to the US from Switzerland at the end of 2021, was found guilty in February of insider trading and hacking. He has a wealth of information relating to the hacking of Democratic Party servers during the 2016 election, and Russia has pushed to include him in prisoner swaps with the US, according to two people familiar with the matter.
The Kommersant newspaper reported in June that a central witness in the case against Sachkov was Sergei Mikhailov, a former senior official with the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main domestic successor to the Soviet-era KGB. He led investigations into cybercriminals in Russia.
Mikhailov was arrested in Moscow in December 2016, one month after the US presidential election, and charged with treason. He was convicted in 2019 and sentenced to 22 years in prison after a trial in which Sachkov was a key witness for the prosecution, according to Mikhailov’s defense team, which has accused Sachkov of providing false testimony.
Although the official details of that case haven’t been made public, three people close to Sachkov and Mikhailov said the two men had known and worked with each other for years, including in collaborating with foreign governments.
Both ultimately provided information to Western officials that helped the US prove Russia’s role in the election hacking, the people say. Those findings led the US to sanction top GRU officials and indict 12 of its alleged agents.
(Updates with appeal in second paragraph)
More stories like this are available on bloomberg.com
©2023 Bloomberg L.P.