Russia Arrested Kaspersky Senior Manager On Treason Charges, Cybersecurity Company Confirms

Kaspersky, Russia's biggest cybersecurity firm, confirmed Wednesday its manager in charge of investigating hacking attacks, Ruslan Stoyanov, was arrested in December. Reports published earlier in Russia's Kommersant newspaper also said Stoyanov was arrested along with a senior Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) intelligence officer, and that both faced charges of treason.

Kaspersky spokeswoman Maria Shirokova reportedly said in a statement that Stoyanov's arrest "has nothing to do with Kaspersky Lab and its operations" and that the company had no details about the charges against Stoyanov. But she mentioned that investigations against Stoyanov had begun even before he was hired by Kaspersky.

Stoyanov was said to have actively worked with FSB and his arrest may have been linked to arrest of one of the FSB department heads, Kommersant reported last year, citing a source close to FSB. On Stoyanov's LinkedIn profile, his previous jobs include a position at the cybercrime unit at the Russian Interior Ministry in the early 2000s.

Founded in 1997 in Moscow, Kaspersky Lab is a cybersecurity and anti-virus provider present in almost 200 countries, and its products and technologies are used by over 300 million users. Kaspersky was recently accused by U.S. intelligence agencies of hacking into election data to help President Donald Trump win. Russia dismissed these allegations, and it is not clear if the arrests have any links to U.S. allegations.

Andrei Soldatov, an expert on Russian security services and the internet, called the arrest of the Kaspersky manager "unprecedented."

"It destroys a system that has been 20 years in the making, the system of relations between intelligence agencies and companies like Kaspersky," he told The Associated Press. "Intelligence agencies used to ask for Kaspersky's advice, and this is how informal ties were built. This romance is clearly over."