FBI descends on cybersecurity firm with links to Donald Trump campaign and the Russian intel community
The FBI has descended today on cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab (sometimes popularly referred to as Kaspersky Labs), interviewing at least a dozen employees about the company’s operations. Kaspersky is known to have connections to at least one key member of the Donald Trump campaign and to the Russian intelligence community. This comes after the Russian government charged one of the company’s executives with treason.
Today’s action by the FBI has been confirmed by NBC News (link), though no one in the media has been able to confirm whether or not the action is part of the FBI’s Trump-Russia investigation. But Kaspersky Lab has numerous connections to both sides. For instance it hired Michael Flynn as a paid consultant in 2015, just months before Flynn went on to become a foreign policy adviser for the Donald Trump campaign. Flynn is known to have had dinner with Russian President Vladimir Putin shortly after he worked for Kaspersky, and shortly before he went to work for Trump.
The founder of the company, Eugene Kaspersky, also has a background with the Soviet KGB, according to that same NBC News report. But the strangest aspect here might be Kaspersky executive Ruslan Stoyanov. NBC seems to have missed the connection, but we managed to dig up an old CBS News report from February of this year documenting that Stoyanov was arrested for “treason” by the Russian government (link). At the time, it led to speculation that Russia may have caught him working with the FBI’s investigation into the Trump-Russia scandal, though this was never substantiated.
For its part, Kaspersky Lab is asserting that it hasn’t worked with any government on any form of cyber espionage. And of course if today’s action by the FBI is about the ongoing Trump-Russia probe, the FBI isn’t going to come out and say it publicly. But with all the connections here, this story needs to be watched closely going forward.
