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Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

reuters.com

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Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#51

Post by lawl »

thaumaturgy wrote: post #19
dbhattar wrote: post #5

We 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...)

It's impossible to prove that these allegations were false. So there's no reputation to lose.

The only ways i can think of to prove innocence (in general) are a) an alibi b) finding who actually did it.

Both of these don't work here, you can't have an alibi for the whole company for 10 years, obviously. You can't find out who did "it" because there's no concrete example. At the very best you can prove that others did it too.

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#52

Post by davidu »

I know this is just my $0.02, which I generally avoid... but:

I would be very skeptical of this entire article, having worked with researchers from Kaspersky for many years. They are terrific partners and care deeply about infosec.

Also, Kaspersky has been known in the past, which they have disclosed, for planting red herrings in malware archives, because they accused (and were right) of other vendors just looking at what Kaspersky blocks and just automatically copying it, without actually doing AV research. That's not what they are being accused of here...

Finally, Joseph is a great journalist, but this article stinks in terms of providing actual evidence.

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#53

Post by VT_Drew »

pppp wrote: post #14

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"

Even better would be: "Ex-employees from Kaspersky Labs say the firm faked malware to harm rivals."

If these claims have any truth to them at all, then it is completely irrelevant that Kaspersky is a Russian firm.

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#54

Post by cpncrunch »

evook wrote: post #48
tptacek wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does Reuters often write "pure propaganda/fluff pieces"? Or is this piece special?

Reuters is pretty known for propaganda and deliberate disinformation of the public. e.g. http://blogs.roosevelt.edu/hsilverman/files/2011/11/Reuters-...

"Pretty known" according to one study (which in itself appears to be the opinion of one person).

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#55

Post by acd »

This would explain incidents of other antivirus software deleting system files. I remember this happening in the past and it now makes more sense.

"Avira Antivirus update cripples millions of Windows PCs ..." "Broken McAfee DAT update cripples Windows workstations" "Update gone wrong. Panda antivirus removing system files ..." "Bad BitDefender Antivirus Update Hobbles Windows PCs ..."

Kaspersky labs has defended against US government malware so they might also get into trouble for that.

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#56

Post by LorenPechtel »

It seems to me that the only people harmed by this were those who were aping Kaspersky instead of doing their own research. How is this different than mapmakers putting irrelevant bogus things on their maps to detect who copied their maps?

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#57

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #56

It seems to me that the only people harmed by this were those who were aping Kaspersky instead of doing their own research. How is this different than mapmakers putting irrelevant bogus things on their maps to detect who copied their maps?

It's a question of intent.

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#58

Post by AJ007 »

theworstshill wrote: post #33

Someone 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.

Is that the conclusion? Or should you use Kaspersky because other anti-virus vendors aren't really doing anything but compiling and selling software with a TM stamp on the name?

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#59

Post by nathanm412 »

LorenPechtel wrote: post #56

It seems to me that the only people harmed by this were those who were aping Kaspersky instead of doing their own research. How is this different than mapmakers putting irrelevant bogus things on their maps to detect who copied their maps?

If Avast is affected by this and the file is a critical system file, real damage can be done to user's systems. Mcafee had this problem five years ago.

Re: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals, say ex-employees

#60

Post by [deleted] »

yetihehe wrote: post #20

The 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…

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