Russia's Prosecutor-General's Office said on December 21 that the Kazakh authorities would extradite Russian cybersecurity expert Nikita Kislitsin to Moscow, although he is also wanted in the United States for allegedly buying illegally obtained personal data.
In late June, Kazakh authorities said they arrested Kislitsin at the request of the United States. Moscow had also requested Kislitsin's extradition to Russia and reportedly urged the Kazakh authorities not to rush to send him to the United States.
According to the Prosecutor-General's Office, Kislitsin is suspected in Russia of extortion and illegal access to online information protected by Russian laws.
Kislitsin is a senior executive at FACCT, a Russian-based spinoff company of Group-IB, one of Russia's top cybersecurity firms, which left Russia in April following Moscow's invasion of Ukraine and sold its assets to FACCT.
Kislitsin had been Group-IB's head of network security before migrating to FACCT.
Kislitsin is wanted in the United States for allegedly buying personal data obtained through the 2012 hack of LinkedIn, and servers of Dropbox and Formspring, a now-defunct social-media site that allowed users to receive answers to questions.
One of Kislitsin's acquaintances and the mastermind of the hacks of the U.S. companies, Yevgeny Nikulin, was extradited to the United States from the Czech Republic in 2018 and sentenced to more than seven years in prison. He was released from jail earlier this year and expelled to Russia.
In July, the Moscow City Court sentenced Group-IB's founder, Ilya Sachkov, to 14 years in prison on a high-treason charge.
The court pronounced the verdict and sentence on July 26 without providing details of the case. It is not clear exactly what Sachkov was accused of as the trial was held behind closed doors because the court said the case materials were classified.
Sachkov is one of a group of prominent people, including scientists and cybersecurity officials, to be arrested in Russia on treason charges in recent years. Moscow has faced numerous allegations of being behind cyberattacks on Western countries -- which it has consistently denied.
Investigators have said Sachkov was suspected of passing classified information to a foreign country.