Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky Lab has been increasingly vilified in the US for acquiring classified US government programs. This hs led to a full ban on Kaspersky software on federal PCs, and several retails dropping the wildly popular program.
Kaspersky Lab’s own internal investigation into the matter revealed that was indeed the case, in as much as its antivirus software “accidentally” swept up NSA malware and its adjoining source code during a 2014 malware scan, even though that malware was itself classified.
This means, however, that the antivirus software was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, sweeping up computer malware, and collecting data for analysis to improve their ability to fight off such attacks in the future.
And that’s exactly what customers are paying for with such companies’ software, and the big problem the US has with Kaspersky seems not to be that it is Russia-based, but that it worked so well it detected their brand new malicious software. Kaspersky is consistently in the top handful of antivirus makers for rate of detection, and this fact seems to be what has made them a target.
LOL. Good report Jason.
The part that gets glossed over by the media is that this moron NSA staffer 1) took classified work home; 2) put it on an unsecured computer connected to the Internet; 3) did not use a virtual machine for his testing; 4) installed a backdoor on his system; 5) then ran KAV to test it without realizing that KAV had the “reporting service” activated.
Whereupon KAV did exactly what it is supposed to do. The NSA is merely trying to deflect from its own stupidity by tacking Kaspersky onto the “Russiagate” nonsense.
Kasper, the Russian Friendly Ghost watching over big bad Uncle Sam from above. I know which brand to buy!