Russian media have reported that another Federal Security Service (FSB) officer has been arrested on treason charges in a case that may be linked to cyberattacks targeting the U.S. presidential election campaign.
The reports by Rambler News Service on January 26 come a day after the Kommersant newspaper reported that a senior officer of the cyberintelligence department of the FSB -- Russia’s lead security agency -- had been arrested.
Kommersant said Sergei Mikhailov, deputy chief of the FSB's Center for Information Security, had been arrested in December on treason charges.
Another Russian newspaper, Novaya Gazeta, on January 26 corroborated the Kommersant report.
Novaya Gazeta quoted unidentified sources as saying Mikhailov was arrested during a meeting with other FSB officers in Moscow, and was taken from the room with a sack over his head.
Also arrested in December was a manager of the renowned Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab.
I read about the Mikhailov two days ago on the New York Times who suggested that "the detention of an official who would have been in a position to engage in the election hacking in America could indicate a good-will gesture to the United States, which has penalized Russia for the electoral meddling."
Yeah somehow I doubt that, but RFE suggests another, more sinister, possibility:
The newspaper quoted unidentified sources as saying that Mikhailov is suspected of providing U.S. intelligence with information about King Servers, a hosting service owned by Russian citizen Vladimir Fomenko.
King Servers was used as a platform by hackers who targeted state-election computer systems in Arizona and Illinois last year. Fomenko, who rents space on his servers, has denied any links to the perpetrators of the cyberattacks.
Currently American intelligence agencies are attempting to investigate the Russian hacking and its effect on our last election.
So if it is true that Mikhailov was helping those intelligence agencies, and he has now been arrested by the Russian government and charged with treason, what is the likelihood that he will still be accessible to the FBI and CIA?
If anything it appears that the Russian government is doing a clean sweep to remove the possibility that the American intelligence agencies will be able to find any definitive links between the hacks and the Russian officials.
Source http://ift.tt/2kCLmgS
