Kazakhstan to extradite suspected hacker wanted by US authorities to Russia

Kazakhstan has agreed to extradite to Russia a cybersecurity expert wanted in the US on hacking charges, the Russian prosecution body said on Thursday.

Nikita Kislitsin, a former executive at the prominent Russian cybersecurity firm Group-IB, was arrested in Kazakhstan in June in connection with the US authorities’ hacking charges against him.

He is accused in the US of hacking into the now-defunct social site Formspring in 2012 and involvement in stealing personal information of millions of LinkedIn and Dropbox users.

At the time of his arrest in Kazakhstan, Kislitsin was working for the Russian organisation FACCT (Fight Against Cybercrime Technologies).

In a statement following the arrest, FACCT said that Kislitsin was under temporary detention “to study the basis for extradition arrest at the request of the United States.” It said the allegations against Kislitsin were not related to his work at FACCT.

The FACCT statement also indicated, for the first time, that Kislitsin was on the Russian authorities wanted list too.

The Russian authorities’ case gave them legal grounds to press Kazakhstan to extradite Kislitsin to Russia, not the US.

The Russian General Prosecutor’s Office said that at its request the Kazakh authorities would extradite Nikita Kislitsin to face charges of “illegal access to protected computer information” and also extortion.  

“The investigators believes that in October 2022 Kislitsin, together with his accomplices, illegally accessed and copied data on a commercial organisation’s server,” the statement said.

It said Kislitsin and the others used the information to extort money from the organisation.

It added that Kislitsin’s extradition was secured thanks to “close cooperation” with the relevant Kazakh government bodies.

In July, a Russian court jailed another prominent cybersecurity specialist, former founder and CEO of Group-IB, Ilya Sachkov for 14 years on treason charges.

Group-IB, which is Kislitsin’s former employer, has fully relocated its operations to Singapore.

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