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Nikita Kislitsin, previously the top of community safety for one among Russia’s prime cybersecurity corporations, was arrested final week in Kazakhstan in response to 10-year-old hacking expenses from the U.S. Department of Justice. Experts say Kislitsin’s prosecution may quickly put the Kazakhstan authorities in a sticky diplomatic place, because the Kremlin is already signaling that it intends to dam his extradition to the United States.
Nikita Kislitsin, at a safety convention in Russia.
Kislitsin is accused of hacking into the now-defunct social networking website Formspring in 2012, and conspiring with one other Russian man convicted of stealing tens of thousands and thousands of usernames and passwords from LinkedIn and Dropbox that very same yr.
In March 2020, the DOJ unsealed two prison hacking indictments towards Kislitsin, who was then head of safety at Group-IB, a cybersecurity firm that was based in Russia in 2003 and operated there for greater than a decade earlier than relocating to Singapore.
Prosecutors in Northern California indicted Kislitsin in 2014 for his alleged position in stealing account knowledge from Formspring. Kislitsin additionally was indicted in Nevada in 2013, however the Nevada indictment doesn’t title his alleged sufferer(s) in that case.
However, paperwork unsealed within the California case point out Kislitsin allegedly conspired with Yevgeniy Nikulin, a Russian man convicted in 2020 of stealing 117 million usernames and passwords from Dropbox, Formspring and LinkedIn in 2012. Nikulin is at the moment serving a seven-year sentence within the U.S. jail system.
As first reported by Cyberscoop in 2020, a trial temporary within the California investigation recognized Nikulin, Kislitsin and two alleged cybercriminals — Oleg Tolstikh and Oleksandr Vitalyevich Ieremenko — as being current throughout a 2012 assembly at a Moscow resort, the place members allegedly mentioned beginning an web café enterprise.
A 2010 indictment out of New Jersey accuses Ieremenko and 6 others with siphoning nonpublic data from the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) and public relations corporations, and making $30 million in unlawful inventory trades based mostly on the proprietary data they stole.
[The U.S. Secret Service has an outstanding $1 million reward for information leading to the arrest of Ieremenko (Александр Витальевич Еременко), who allegedly went by the hacker handles “Zl0m” and “Lamarez.”]
Kislitsin was employed by Group-IB in January 2013, practically six months after the Formspring hack. Group-IB has since moved its headquarters to Singapore, and in April 2023 the corporate introduced it had absolutely exited the Russian market.
In an announcement offered to KrebsOnSecurity, Group-IB stated Mr. Kislitsin is not an worker, and that he now works for a Russian group referred to as FACCT, which stands for “Fight Against Cybercrime Technologies.”
“Dmitry Volkov, co-founder and CEO, sold his stake in Group-IB’s Russia-based business to the company’s local management,” the assertion reads. “The stand-alone business in Russia has been operating under the new brand FACCT ever since and will continue to operate as a separate company with no connection to Group-IB.”
FACCT says on its web site that it’s a “Russian developer of technologies for combating cybercrime,” and that it really works with shoppers to combat focused assaults, knowledge leaks, fraud, phishing and model abuse. In an announcement revealed on-line, FACCT stated Kislitsin is liable for growing its community safety enterprise, and that he stays below short-term detention in Kazakhstan “to study the basis for extradition arrest at the request of the United States.”
“According to the information we have, the claims against Kislitsin are not related to his work at FACCT, but are related to a case more than 10 years ago when Nikita worked as a journalist and independent researcher,” FACCT wrote.
From 2006 to 2012, Kislitsin was editor-in-chief of “Hacker,” a well-liked Russian-language month-to-month journal that features articles on data and community safety, programming, and incessantly options interviews with and articles penned by notable or needed Russian hackers.
“We are convinced that there are no legal grounds for detention on the territory of Kazakhstan,” the FACCT assertion continued. “The company has hired lawyers who have been providing Nikita with all the necessary assistance since last week, and we have also sent an appeal to the Consulate General of the Russian Federation in Kazakhstan to assist in protecting our employee.”
FACCT indicated that the Kremlin has already intervened within the case, and the Russian authorities claims Kislitsin is needed on prison expenses in Russia and should as a substitute be repatriated to his homeland.
“The FACCT emphasizes that the announcement of Nikita Kislitsin on the wanted list in the territory of the Russian Federation became known only today, June 28, 6 days after the arrest in Kazakhstan,” FACCT wrote. “The company is monitoring developments.”
The Kremlin adopted an identical playbook within the case of Aleksei Burkov, a cybercriminal who lengthy operated two of Russia’s most unique underground hacking boards. Burkov was arrested in 2015 by Israeli authorities, and the Russian authorities fought Burkov’s extradition to the U.S. for 4 years — even arresting and jailing an Israeli lady on phony drug expenses to pressure a prisoner swap.
That effort in the end failed: Burkov was despatched to America, pleaded responsible, and was sentenced to 9 years in jail.
Alexei Burkov, seated second from proper, attends a listening to in Jerusalem in 2015. Image: Andrei Shirokov / Tass by way of Getty Images.
Arkady Bukh is a U.S. legal professional who has represented dozens of accused hackers from Russia and Eastern Europe who had been extradited to the United States through the years. Bukh stated Moscow is prone to flip the Kislitsin case right into a diplomatic time bomb for Kazakhstan, which shares an unlimited border and an excessive amount of cultural ties with Russia. A 2009 census discovered that Russians make up about 24 p.c of the inhabitants of Kazakhstan.
“That would put Kazakhstan at a crossroads to choose between unity with Russia or going with the West,” Bukh stated. “If that happens, Kazakhstan may have to make some very unpleasant decisions.”
Group-IB’s exodus from Russia comes as its former founder and CEO Ilya Sachkov stays languishing in a Russian jail, awaiting a farcical trial and an inevitable conviction on expenses of treason. In September 2021, the Kremlin issued treason expenses towards Sachkov, though it has up to now refused to reveal any particulars in regards to the allegations.
Sachkov’s pending treason trial has been the topic of a lot hypothesis amongst denizens of Russian cybercrime boards, and the consensus appears to be that Sachkov and Group-IB had been seen as a little bit too useful to the DOJ in its varied investigations involving prime Russian hackers.
Indeed, since its inception in 2003, Group-IB’s researchers have helped to determine, disrupt and even catch quite a few high-profile Russian hackers, most of whom acquired busted after years of prison hacking as a result of they made the unforgivable mistake of stealing from their very own residents.
When the indictments towards Kislitsin had been unsealed in 2020, Group-IB issued a prolonged assertion testifying to his character and saying they’d assist him along with his authorized protection. As a part of that assertion, Group-IB famous that “representatives of the Group-IB company and, in particular, Kislitsin, in 2013, on their own initiative, met with employees of the US Department of Justice to inform them about the research work related to the underground, which was carried out by Kislitsin in 2012.”