* > Basically, Kaspersky's role of tracking nation-state malware inflitrations gives them a position as a quasi-intelligence agency. The US government didn't like that, because they constantly out the various programs going on, and because they operate out of Moscow. So the US and/or its allies infiltrated their network and reverse engineered its software in order to find whatever dirt they could. https://www.observeit.com/blog/kaspersky-lab-nation-state-at...https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kasper...
Is revenge the only motive to do this, if indeed it was the NSA (it's likely it is)? Wasn't there an allegation that Kaspersky software had exfiltrated NSA employees' and contractors inappropriately-stored classified material? Or wouldn't it makes sense for the NSA, an intelligence agency, to spy on a foreign company with good access to information about foreign officials?
Kaspersky didn't exfiltrate anything. An NSA contractor brought home classified files and put them on a machine on the internet that had Kaspersky AV. The AV tagged the files as malware and uploaded it to Kaspersky's servers to be analyzed. It's another ridiculous screw-up by the NSA that they had to cover for. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/russian-hackers-... Quote:
"Not only is the work of the NSA and CIA increasingly visible, there is
a certain aggression implied by this," he said. "It's a 'game-on' moment."
Kaspersky, he said, should be treated as a hostile actor.
Israel was inside Kaspersky's network, found the Russians looking for US files (or so they claim) which had been just hanging around on their servers for a year, and so they notified the NSA about the breach. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky-lab-...
I don't believe any agency operates based on revenge. They operate based on politics. Can they really continue to fund this organization that is constantly pulling their pants down? Kaspersky's biggest flaw here is just having shit security.
"However, the anti-Kaspersky train picked up steam following revelations last year of a bizarre incident in which the company slurped up classified documents and source code from the home computer of a National Security Agency contractor running Kaspersky Internet Security software. That contractor, Nghia Hoang Pho, pleaded guilty last year to willfully mishandling classified material by taking it home.
"Kaspersky claimed the incident was an unintended byproduct of its routine malware scanning. The source code was for an NSA hacking tool, which Kaspersky’s product properly flagged for analysis by malware researchers. But because the code was bundled in a ZIP archive with the classified documents, Kaspersky’s software uploaded the entire thing. When Eugene Kaspersky realized what had happened, he ordered his researchers to immediately delete their copy of the documents and code, the company asserted in a blog post last year. “The archive was not shared with any third parties,” the company wrote."
Presumably, it was an isolated incident and we can trust Kaspersky's statement about their actions. No?
That was more than an allegation, Kaspersky has admitted it happened, and the person with the inappropriately stored classified material was found guilty.
The important thing to note that is the way it happened makes me comfortable in saying that all the big anti-virus products have received similar breaches of classified material and we just don't know about it. Any antivirus company that isn't sending unknown but suspicious code back for analysis is completely incompetent (this should be a setting for privacy reasons, but they need to make sure it is on where possible). You can accuse the various vendors of problems, but none are that incompetent.
Is revenge the only motive to do this, if indeed it was the NSA (it's likely it is)? Wasn't there an allegation that Kaspersky software had exfiltrated NSA employees' and contractors inappropriately-stored classified material? Or wouldn't it makes sense for the NSA, an intelligence agency, to spy on a foreign company with good access to information about foreign officials?