The U.S. government announced sanctions on Friday against 12 executives and senior managers at Russia-based cybersecurity giant Kaspersky.
In a press release, the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) announced that it has appointed 12 executives to help protect internet users from malicious cyber threats.
“Today's actions against Kaspersky Lab officials underscore our commitment to ensuring the integrity of the cyber domain and protecting our citizens from malicious cyber threats,” Brian E. Nelson, Under Secretary of the Treasury for Counterterrorism and Financial Intelligence, said in a press release. “The United States will take action as necessary to hold accountable those who seek to facilitate or enable these activities.”
The list of sanctions includes several members of Kaspersky's board of directors, including Andrei Anatolyevich Efremov, who is also Kaspersky's chief business development officer, and Igor Gennadievich Chekunov, the company's chief legal officer.
The sanctions also include Kaspersky Lab's global human resources head Marina Mikhailovna Alexeyev, the company's public relations director Denis Vladimirovich Zenkin and chief technology officer Anton Mikhailovich Ivanov.
OFAC noted that it did not impose sanctions on Kaspersky Lab, its parent company or subsidiaries, or the company's founder and CEO, Eugene Kaspersky.
A Treasury spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment asking why Kaspersky's CEO was not included on the sanctions list. A Kaspersky spokesman also did not respond to a request for comment.
The sanctions will make it more difficult for the named executives to start new companies, effectively banning U.S. customers and companies from making payments to Kaspersky Lab. Earlier this year, the U.S. government imposed similar sanctions on spyware maker Intelexa and its founder.
Kaspersky's management structure (Image: US Treasury Department)
The sanctions come a day after the U.S. government announced a “first-of-its-kind” measure to ban the sale of Kaspersky Lab software in the U.S., which takes effect on July 20. Kaspersky Lab can continue to provide updates to its software to existing customers, but only until September 29. After that, U.S. customers who still use Kaspersky Lab will no longer be able to get updates, which could result in their antivirus software becoming outdated and unable to stop the latest cybersecurity threats.
Kaspersky spokesman Sawyer Van Horn said Thursday that the company plans to appeal the ban.
The U.S. government has taken action against Kaspersky for years, accusing the company of being used as an instrument of Russian government influence to hack U.S. targets and damage national security.
In September 2017, the Trump administration banned government agencies from using the company's software. Earlier that year, Russian government hackers reportedly stole classified U.S. documents from the home computer of an intelligence contractor that was running Kaspersky antivirus software at the time.