Court document points to Kaspersky Lab’s cooperation with Russian security service

Kaspersky Lab, a Russian cybersecurity firm, has long asserted its independence of the Russian government. But a court document posted on the Facebook page of a Russian criminal suspect this year shows what appears to be an unusual degree of closeness to the FSB, the country’s powerful security service.

The suspect, Konstantin Kozlovskiy, was arrested in the summer of 2016 in connection with a series of cyber heists of Russian banks, and he is in a Moscow jail awaiting trial. From his cell, he posted documents related to his case.

One of them shows that in April 2015, an FSB agent inside the office of Kaspersky Lab in Moscow gave a company technician a password for a suspected Russian cyber criminal’s computer. The technician gained access to the computer and obtained decrypted documents for the agent.

The agent, A.V. Kutasevich, worked side-by-side with the Kaspersky technician, Ruslan Sabitov, in the “information retrieval” operation, according to the document, dated April 28, 2015.

Read the whole story from The Washington Post.

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