The convicted founder of the cybersecurity company Group-IB (the Russian business changed its name to FACCT) Ilya Sachkov could make a huge contribution to the cybersecurity of Russia, such specialists cannot be scattered. Boris Titov, authorized under the President of Russia for the protection of the rights of entrepreneurs, told RBC about this.
“I did not study the criminal case of Ilya Sachkov, the article is not entrepreneurial. But, knowing him, I can say for sure that he could not betray the Motherland, but as an IT specialist he made (and could have made) a huge contribution to its cybersecurity. We don’t have many specialists of such a level to scatter them like that, ”he said.
Sachkov was sentenced to 14 years in prison on charges of treason. According to the investigation, announced by the Prosecutor General’s Office after the verdict was announced, in 2011 Sachkov handed over to foreign intelligence information that falls under state secrets. RBC sources previously linked the arrest of the founder of Group-IB with a treason case from 2016, in which the head of the FSB Information Security Center Sergey Mikhailov and an employee of Kaspersky Lab Ruslan Stoyanov (Sachkov was a witness), and with malware that encrypt the data on the victim’s computer and demand a ransom for their decryption. Bloomberg sources said that Sachkov allegedly provided the US authorities with data on the “Russian military intelligence hacker group GRU”, known as Fancy Bear, and its attempts to influence the US presidential election.
Sachkov himself pleaded not guilty. He insisted that the criminal case had nothing to do with the work and direct activities of Group-IB. One of the posts on Sachkov’s telegram channel says that he was arrested “under the slander” of Mikhailov.
