"Kaspersky's exposure of the program will likely not win the company any points in its battle to get off a US federal government blacklist."
Is that just rhetorical flourish? Or is Kaspersky actually going to be penalized for doing their jobs? Is there an implication that other security companies have been "recruited" by the government to turn a blind eye towards government-sponsored malware?
Six months ago I speculated (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15242367) that Kaspersky was banned from US Govt use due to not playing ball with a political entity in the government. Now we know that simply by pursuing their normal business objectives, Kaspersky has hurt the government's counterterrorism efforts.
This could've happened by accident, but the way they were treated over several years by the intelligence services, military and Congress to me says Government knew this would eventually happen and tried (and failed) to get them to not flag this kind of malware. It's possible that by not agreeing to curtail research of certain malware, they were punished by having their contracts taken away.
"Kaspersky's exposure of the program will likely not win the company any points in its battle to get off a US federal government blacklist."
Is that just rhetorical flourish? Or is Kaspersky actually going to be penalized for doing their jobs? Is there an implication that other security companies have been "recruited" by the government to turn a blind eye towards government-sponsored malware?