Title is inaccurate - the important part at the end was cut off: "- Ex-employees" Accusation is presented as fact. This would be a better title: "Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals - say ex-employees"
"disgruntled ex-employees"
Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
31–40 of 102 posts
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#32Title is inaccurate - the important part at the end was cut off: "- Ex-employees" Accusation is presented as fact. This would be a better title: "Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals - say ex-employees"
"disgruntled ex-employees"
Snowden was a "disgruntled ex-employee". Sometimes there are good reasons to leave a company.
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#33Someone wants to push people off Kaspersky. Counter-intuitive as it is, everyone in the west should use eastern (russian/chinese) anti-viruses and OS, and vice versa. That way, it'll be harder for each government to abuse and spy on their own citizens since I doubt Kaspersy entertains any request from foreign govs.
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#34would seem to me that an antivirus software company should guard pretty heavily against this kind of attack, since if it works anyone could sabotage a rival by anonymously submitting doctored versions of their software.
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#35The whole article sounds funny. "VirusTotal had no immediate comment." "[...], Kaspersky denied using this technique. It said it too had been a victim of such an attack in November 2012, when an "unknown third party" manipulated Kaspersky into misclassifying files [...]" "The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals [...] They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack." "In a s…
Pure propaganda/fluff piece to damage the company. The media has been going hard against Kaspersky in coordination with government agencies.
The first and foremost "target" here is not only Kaspersky (i.e. Russian tech/security industry) but Russia itself.
Notice again the title ;)
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#36Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#37Isn't is a breach of trust for a protector-against-malware to also be a producer-of-malware? I'd certainly reconsider my Kaspersky license if I had one.
This doesn't allege that they produced malware, only that they produced false positives for competitors. They didn't deploy any actual malware.
It sounds like they took advantage of the fact that most malware fingerprinting uses md5 to create collisions with known good files, then uploaded bad files with a matching signature to the places that aggregate bad md5s.
Again, all allegedly.
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
"disgruntled ex-employees"
Snowden was a "disgruntled ex-employee". Sometimes there are good reasons to leave a company.
Yes, but that doesn't mean this information isn't relevant when considering how to interpret the claims.
Especially in the absence of actual evidence.
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#39The whole article sounds funny. "VirusTotal had no immediate comment." "[...], Kaspersky denied using this technique. It said it too had been a victim of such an attack in November 2012, when an "unknown third party" manipulated Kaspersky into misclassifying files [...]" "The former Kaspersky employees said Microsoft was one of the rivals [...] They declined to give a detailed account of any specific attack." "In a s…
Pure propaganda/fluff piece to damage the company. The media has been going hard against Kaspersky in coordination with government agencies.
Does Reuters often write "pure propaganda/fluff pieces"? Or is this piece special?
Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees
#40We have started seeing a lot of bad publicity and innuendos targeted toward Kaspersky after they uncovered and published about hacking attack against their infrastructure in recent past. Feels suspicious to me especially with comments attributed to 'former employees'.
I agree that it smells a bit, but take a quick look at the author, Joseph Menn. He's been floating around tech reporting for a while and seems to have some netsec chops. This isn't an article coming out of the State Department or some anonymous blog; there's a name behind it of someone who'd have their reputation to lose if it turned out to be a bunch of false allegations. (Not that that's never happened before...)
If the information turns out to be false then the anonymous sources get blamed, not the author.