Steptoe Cyberlaw Podcast

Geopolitics has always played a role in prosecuting hackers. But it’s getting a lot more complicated, as Kurt Sanger reports. Responding to a U.S. request, a Russian cybersecurity executive has been arrested in Kazakhstan, accused of having hacked Dropbox and Linkedin more than ten years ago. The executive, Nikita Kislitsin, has been hammered by geopolitics in that time. The firm he joined after the alleged hacking, Group IB, has seen its CEO arrested by Russia for treason—probably for getting too close to U.S. investigators. Group IB sold off all its Russian assets and moved to Singapore, while Kislitsin stayed behind, but showed up in Kazakhstan recently, perhaps as a result of the Ukraine war. Now both Russia and the U.S. have dueling extradition requests before the Kazakh authorities; Paul Stephan points out that Kazakhstan’s tenuous independence from Russia will be tested by the tug of war.  In more hacker geopolitics, Kurt and Justin Sherman examine the hacking of a Russian satellite communication sy