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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

#81

Post by enraged_camel »

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...)

I wouldn't put too much weight into his reputation. John Broder (of NYT) also had a good reputation for journalistic integrity until he posted a falsified[1] review piece of a Tesla.

[1]http://www.teslamotors.com/blog/most-peculiar-test-drive

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

#82

Post by enlightenedfool »

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…

"Kaspersky has won wide respect in the industry for its research on sophisticated Western spying programs and the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran's nuclear program in 2009 and 2010" Can't rule out a campaign to smear them. No hard evidence in the report. Just speculation.

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

#84

Post by yabun »

kazinator wrote: post #77

This seems like fair game, and it benefits the consumer by keeping the anti-virus people on their toes. Kaspersky has demonstrated a weakness: that the firms copy each other's data and blindly trust each other as well as the initial submissions. They have a submission process for infected files which can be demonstrably abused to inject false positives. Also this: > Then, when competitors ran this doctored file throu…

A lot of new malware is self-modifying. In situations where this is the case checksums lose most if not all of their value. Heuristics in such situations are really the only viable option.

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

#85

Post by AmVess »

SpikedCola wrote: post #79
nos4A2 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is interesting, because I thought Symantec was the incorruptible AV co.

Have you ever used their product(s)? Given the way they used to slow PCs down to a halt, I didn't/wouldn't trust them to do a halfway-decent job.

Their products haven't been system hogs for a long time now. I used Norton AV on a fairly reedy dual core Celeron (1.8 GHz)with a platter drive and it only slowed that thing down when it was running a scheduled scan.

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

#86

Post by rebootthesystem »

Not being pedantic. I realize English isn't everyone's first language. And then there's auto-completion on devices like iPad's that can result in embarrassing errors.

It's "principle", not "principal". They are very different.

I see this a lot, used in the other direction, on job postings "Principle Engineer" as opposed to "Principal Engineer".

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

#87

Post by dragonwriter »

rebootthesystem wrote: post #86

Not being pedantic. I realize English isn't everyone's first language. And then there's auto-completion on devices like iPad's that can result in embarrassing errors. It's "principle", not "principal". They are very different. I see this a lot, used in the other direction, on job postings "Principle Engineer" as opposed to "Principal Engineer".

> Not being pedantic. I realize English isn't everyone's first language. And then there's auto-completion on devices like iPad's that can result in embarrassing errors.

Embarrassing errors like using "'s" to form a plural, instead of the correct "s"?

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

#88

Post by lawnchair_larry »

Rudism wrote: post #63

I'd find this very surprising, if true. When I worked for a company that was essentially developing malware, we were able to get ourselves whitelisted by most anti-virus software (either by going through an automated submission process, or outright bribery). The only one who wouldn't budge on principal, no matter what we offered, was Kaspersky. All the others either auto-whitelisted us when we asked or after we paid…

If that happened, it had nothing to do with bribery and corruption, but incompetence.

Kaspersky's refusal isn't a sign of their integrity, but avoidance of an obvious trap. I'm not saying they don't have integrity, but even if they didn't, it would be very dumb to take that bribe, especially in a country very familiar with corporate blackmail.

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

#89

Post by throwawayaway »

cpncrunch wrote: post #49
throwawayaway wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every day, nothing special about it: http://ca.reuters.com/article/topNews/idCATRE6A840J20101109

I don't see how an interview with Bush about his book has anything to do with propoganda.

"pure propaganda/fluff pieces"

if you don't see how this matches either description fair dues to you.

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

#90

Post by evook »

x5n1 wrote: post #50
evook wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

The article is about how Reuters biases public perception in favor of Palestinians and it's written by Henry I. Silverman who may or may not have an agenda of his own. That's the thing, everyone has an agenda. Just because someone is calling someone out on something that does not mean that they themselves are not motivated by their own agenda.

Meh, it was an "example given". How much do you want? Another famous one would be MH17 and Fedotov. Also you should read the definition of agenda, you clearly misused it. ("the things that must be done"[1]). The word you were looking for was motive.

That Reuters isn't a reliable source of information isn't a matter of motive or "agenda", it is common sense within educated circles.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agenda

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