A court in Samara sentenced an employee of the Progress Rocket and Space Center, which manufactures Soyuz rockets, for connecting a working computer to the Internet. The regional department of the FSB informed Interfax and 63.ru about this.
According to the FSB, the Samara citizen “connected his work computer to the Internet and violated the rules for working with information resources, endangering the security of the data center of a defense enterprise ”.
We are talking about the electronics engineer of the IT department of Progress Esine A.E. — Mediazona found only one sentence under the article on «unlawful impact on critical infrastructure» of Russia in the file cabinets of local courts. The Kirovsky District Court of Samara in February 2023 assigned the IT specialist a year and a half of a suspended sentence, and in May the sentence was replaced with a year of probation.
The FSB, however, claims that the sentence of the Progress employee was upheld on appeal.
According to the verdict, due to sanctions, the head of Yesin's bureau in August 2020 asked him to replace the Western program for accessing the internal network of the enterprise, Cisco Secure Access Control Server, with another one. Yesin chose the free FreeRadius program and connected to the Internet to download the installation files, taking precautions.
Esin noted that it was impossible to buy and renew support for Cisco ACS after 2014, and a license for one device was expensive. According to him, by his actions he saved the company 2.4 million rubles. At the same time, Esin's boss said in court that the security measures taken were insufficient.
As a result, the company's computers were not infected, but the investigation considered it «technological and operational harm», which «created the opportunity» for «causing critical damage up to the incapacitation and loss of data” (Part 3 of Article 274.1 of the Criminal Code).
The article on which Yesin was judged appeared in 2017. Depending on the consequences, it involves up to 10 years in prison.