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Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

theregister.com

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Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#21

[flagged]

Totally makes sense, since Kaspersky is not just an anti-virus company and it's not just "part-Russian"

They're literally a contractor and consultant to russian military.

https://informnapalm.org/en/alabugaleaks-part-2-kaspersky-la...

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#22

All Russian software should have been banned back in 2014.

Telegram is a big source of news within Russia for Osint, banning access would be detrimental to journalism

TG isn't Russian, I believe they are based in Dubai

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#23

All Russian software should have been banned back in 2014.

Telegram is a big source of news within Russia for Osint, banning access would be detrimental to journalism

Telegram is barely russian. The founder is basically a russian dissident and a French citizen.

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#24
...and also ban the antivirus maker from distributing software updates and malware signatures to existing Stateside customers after September 29

Some percentage of customers won't bother to switch to a competing product, letting the stale signatures linger instead, and ironically that'll make them more vulnerable to hackers and state adversaries.

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#25

[flagged]

Obviously this decision is political- it's expressly because of sanctions.

You are raising a "what about" question here. "If you do this then what-about that?" Or perhaps "before you do this perhaps worry about that."

But these issues are completely unrelated. One is political (and trivial to deal with) another is technical (and a vastly bigger, and more complicated topic).

For starters if congress set out to "prevent spyware", I'd suggest they lack the skillset to even define "spyware" much less the technical expertise to effectively ban it in some way. I certainly would not expect them to somehow ban "spyware" whole at the same time leabing all "not spyware" unaffected.

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#26
My first thought was "what do they know about Kaspersky that makes them suddenly want to burn it to the ground?"

This article talks about some possible reasons:

https://www.wired.com/story/us-kaspersky-ban-evidence/

> Stories in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal have since cited anonymous sources accusing Kaspersky of siphoning American secrets, including the files of an NSA staffer, to its own servers, where the Russian government then accessed them.

To be clear, the article doesn't consider this a smoking gun, and instead is demanding a more concrete statement of the government's reasons.

But, personally, I'm completely fine with erring on the side of not trusting a security company operating in Russia with access to my computer. Let's say Kaspersky has the most honest and best intentions in the world, and would never voluntarily cooperate with Putin's government to spy on or harm foreign computers. Does anyone think their protests would matter at all, if push came to shove? This is like the TikTok argument, but with a more obvious attack vector if the software came under direct control of a hostile government.

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#28

All Russian software should have been banned back in 2014.

Why?

For the same reason that the Russians ban our NGOs. They're not neutral groups independent of their sovereign.

To say otherwise is naive.

Re: Biden puts a bullet in Kaspersky: Sales, updates to be banned in America

#29
post #4

Serious question: do people still use antivirus software?

Definitely. As a developer, I was totally fucked by one of our customers' antivirus software.

That AV software has very poor performance. It significantly slows down the DLL/file loading. And the firewall component just simply add delay to all HTTP requests. The “Exclusion” function is also useless as expected. It cost me a lot of meaningless time to investigate the performance issue reported by customers.

And you cannot even imagine that as an AV software, their self-protection component is running as a simple Windows service. You can easily disable that by setting a wrong user account to that service. After restart, you can do whatever you want.

Honestly, if I am the one who writes virus. I would give credit to the company who make such poor antivirus software and sell to thousands of customers. They do make life easier.

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