Ruslan Stoyanov is a Russian computer scientist. In December 2016, he was arrested on charges of treason as part of the Mikhailov case. In 2019, he was sentenced to 14 years in prison.
In 2010, Stoyanov was reportedly the owner of Indrik, a computer crime investigative firm, until it was bought by Kaspersky Labs in 2012. From then on, he worked in the computer incident investigation department of Kaspersky Labs until his arrest in 2016.[4][5][6][7][8][9]
Arrest
In early December 2016, Stoyanov was arrested by the FSB on charges of treason.[10] In Russia, treason is defined possessing secret information. even without sharing it, or as sharing information with a foreign state that damages state security. The new law does not require authorities to prove a suspect damaged state security.[11]
In Stoyanov's case, he was accused of sharing information about convicted Russian cyber criminal Pavel Vrublevsky[12] with American authorities. Stoyanov, along with two other men involved in the conviction of Vrublevksy, were among those accused.[13][14]
Conviction
In February 2019, a Moscow court convicted Stoyanov of high treason, and sentenced him to 14 years in prison.[15]
He was alleged to have caused Russian state secrets about convicted cybercriminal Pavel Vrublevsky's company, ChronoPay, to be passed along to the FBI.[16][14] He was specifically accused of giving information about Vrublevksy's criminal operations to Kimberly Zenz, a private sector cybersecurity researcher that the court accused of being an American agent.
Zenz denied all such accusations and asked the court to permit her to testify. The Russian court ignored her request.[17][18] Zenz discussed her experience with the accusations, and the infighting among the Russian security services that she believes played a role in the accusations.[19][20] In their book, The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries, Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan report that the case was also motivated by a desire by Russian security services to stop international cooperation between Russian investigators and researchers and those in the West.[21]
Hospitalization
In October 2018, Stoyanov had reportedly suffered a pulmonary embolism.[22][23]
^Menn, Joseph; Stubbs, Jack (February 8, 2017). "Cyber expert's arrest silences Russian contacts of some Western crime fighters". Reuters. Archived from the original on June 30, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. Stoyanov worked for the cyber crime unit at Russia's Interior Ministry from 2001-2006 before leaving law enforcement for the private sector, first for a large Internet service provider and then for Indrik, a small Russian internet security firm.
^Krebs, Brian (January 28, 2017). "A Shakeup in Russia's Top Cybercrime Unit". Archived from the original on April 26, 2019. Retrieved July 17, 2020. Prior to Kaspersky, Stoyanov served as deputy director at a cybercrime investigation firm called Indrik, and before that as a major in the Russian Ministry of Interior's Moscow Cyber Crime Unit.
^"Making Sense of Russia's Cyber Treason Scandal". Stratfor. February 9, 2017. Archived from the original on July 26, 2018. Retrieved July 17, 2020. Kaspersky Lab's Stoyanov was a career cybersecurity professional, previously working for the Indrik computer crime investigation firm and the Interior Ministry's computer crime unit.
^"Kaspersky Lab manager accused of high treason spoke about cyber fraudsters working for the state". News Ru. April 12, 2017. Archived from the original on June 30, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. According to a prominent American cybercrime expert, Brian Krebs, author of the computer security blog KrebsOnSecurity[.]com and the columnist of The Washington Post, Stoyanov was the owner of Indrik before joining Kaspersky Lab and specialized in DDOS attacks and defending against them. Indrik and Stoyanov personally had close contacts with the well-known cybercrime analyst Kimberly Zenz, who worked with Russia at iDefence, which, in turn, belongs to the notorious Verisign, which actively collaborates with American intelligence agencies. Novaya Gazeta claimed that Stoyanov's partner in Indrik and his close friend were Dmitry Levashov, who was the civil husband of Kimberly Zenz. It was through Levashov and Stoyanov that Zents allegedly received information first from other persons involved in the case of high treason - the head of one of the units of the center for information security (CIB) of the FSB of the Russian Federation, Sergei Mikhailov, and then from his subordinate Dmitry Dokuchaev, with whom, it is alleged, Stoyanov introduced her.
^Kolomyichenko, Maria; Solopov, Maxim (September 20, 2019). "Hacker accused ex-Kaspersky employee of forded hacking". RBC. Archived from the original on June 23, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. Since 2012, Ruslan Stoyanov worked at Kaspersky Lab, before that he also served in the management of special technical events (USM) of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate in Moscow and left him with the rank of police major.
^ abMurtazine, Irek (February 28, 2019). "What confuses the sentence to the officer of the FSB Center for Information Security Mikhailov". Novaya Gazeta. Archived from the original on June 28, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. On October 5, 2018, Kommersant reported that Mikhailov and other defendants were charged with two episodes related to the criminal case of the founder and CEO of the Chronopay processing company Pavel Vrublevsky and hackers Dmitry and Igor Artimovich.
^Alekhina, Margarite (February 26, 2019). "The fight against cybercrime turned into treason: FSB and Kaspersky Lab employees sentenced to many years". RBC. Archived from the original on July 17, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. The Moscow District Military Court found guilty of high treason and sentenced Sergei Mikhailov, formerly the head of the department of the Information Security Center (CIB) of the FSB, and Ruslan Stoyanov, formerly the head of the department at Kaspersky Lab, and formerly the operative of the department of special technical events of the Central Internal Affairs Directorate for Moscow, to 22 and 14 years of imprisonment in a maximum security colony, respectively.
^"Ex-FSB employee and top manager of Kaspersky Lab convicted of treason". BBC. February 26, 2019. Archived from the original on July 17, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. According to media reports, the materials said that in 2011, Mikhailov, through a chain of intermediaries, transferred to the FBI information about the operational-search activities in the case of the founder of the Chronopay processing company, Pavel Vrublevsky, who in the USA is considered a cybercriminal.
^"The trial of the ex-manager of Kaspersky Lab accused of treason has been suspended". Interfax. October 30, 2018. Archived from the original on July 1, 2020. Retrieved July 17, 2020. Former head of the Kaspersky Lab's computer incident investigation department, Ruslan Stoyanov, was hospitalized, spokeswoman for the Moscow District Military Court (MOU) Irina Zhirnova told Interfax on Tuesday. "The trial has been suspended because one of the defendants, Ruslan Stoyanov, was hospitalized," she said. According to her, the accused got to the hospital on October 17. The court did not specify the diagnosis and state of health of Stoyanov.
