A Russian military court on Tuesday found two cyber security experts from Kaspersky Lab guilty of treason. The men, a former state security officer and a former cyber-security expert at Kaspersky Lab, were sentenced to 22 and 14 years in jail, respectively, Russian news agencies reported. Col. Sergei Mikhailov, a former officer in Russia’s Federal Security Service, and Ruslan Stoyanov, head of the computer incidents investigation team at Kaspersky Lab, were both convicted of passing secret information to foreign intelligence services, agencies reported. During a top-secret trial, the men faced accusations that they shared confidential material from a 2010 cybercrime and spam investigation to an analyst at a U.S. security firm. That analyst, Kimberly Zenz, never testified—and insisted in an interview with The Daily Beast that Stoyanov didn’t commit treason.
Last year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) required the U.S. government to fully purge itself of “any hardware, software, or services developed or provided, in whole or in part,” by Kaspersky Lab. The purge was over concerns the Kremlin may use the Moscow-based company to infiltrate or infect U.S. computer networks that used the software.
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