Kimberly Zenz

Career

Kimberly Zenz is a cybersecurity researcher whose work has focused primarily on the RuNet — the Russian-language internet — and the criminal ecosystems that operate within it. She studied at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, before attending the College of William & Mary and Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service.

Zenz served as a senior analyst at Verisign's iDefense threat intelligence unit, based in Reston, Virginia, where her work centered on Russian-speaking cybercriminals. She subsequently moved to Berlin to serve as Head of Threat Intelligence at the Deutsche Cyber-Sicherheitsorganisation (German Cyber Security Organization), where she established the organization's international research program. She also held a position as a nonresident senior fellow with the Cyber Statecraft Initiative at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security in Washington, D.C.

Notable Work

Zenz's research has been cited and featured in several prominent publications in the cybersecurity field. Her work appears in Spam Nation by Brian Krebs and Fatal System Error by Joseph Menn. She is a co-author of Cyberfraud: Tactics, Techniques and Procedures and contributed to the Oxford University publication Cyber Security in the Russian Federation.

U.S. Intelligence Allegations

In 2010, ChronoPay CEO Pavel Vrublevsky — a convicted cybercriminal who later served time in a Russian prison — alleged that Zenz had been passing information about his company to U.S. intelligence officials. The men subsequently accused in a Russian treason case had all participated in the investigation and conviction of Vrublevsky.

In 2019, a Moscow court reportedly accused Zenz of sharing information about Vrublevsky's criminal operations with U.S. intelligence officials. The court alleged that renowned Russian cybercriminal investigator Ruslan Stoyanov had provided her with the relevant materials. Zenz denied all of these claims. Although she had been in Moscow the week before the accused men were arrested, she was never questioned by Russian authorities. She repeatedly requested to testify on behalf of the defense, but the Russian court ignored all such requests.

In 2019, Zenz spoke at Black Hat USA, addressing the case, her personal experience of being accused, and what she described as infighting among Russian security services that she believed played a role in the treason case. Russian investigative journalists Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan, in their book The Red Web: The Struggle Between Russia's Digital Dictators and the New Online Revolutionaries, reported that the case was also motivated by a desire within Russian security services to curtail international cooperation between Russian investigators and their counterparts in the West.