Kaspersky Lab accused of sabotaging rivals with fake malware

Allegations published by Reuters claim that Russian firm Kaspersky, which now has roughly 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients, was engaged in a secret campaign to ruin smaller competitors.

The bay area Beginning several years ago, one of the most prominent intrusion establishments on earth, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, started to destruction rivals around by deceiving their own antivirus plans into determining civilized archive as malignant, according to a couple of former personnel. “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable”.

Reuters has a scoop from two anonymous ex-Kaspersky Lab employees who claim to have worked on a secret project to sabotage the company’s competitors. The files were posted to see if competitors were improperly copying Kaspersky’s research work; within a week and a half, Kalkhul reported at the time, 14 companies had also labeled the files as malicious. These companies had no comment on the Kaspersky allegation, but had previously informed Reuters of an unknown third party trying to trick them into marking false positives.

However Kaspersky refute this and said that it has been the victim of such a campaign in the past. The company then submitted the modified versions of the software to Google’s VirusTotal aggregation service and flagged them as infected. Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat data exchange is a critical part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and we fight hard to help ensure that this exchange is not compromised or corrupted.

Kaspersky said that the accusations from “disgruntled ex-employees” are “meritless and simply false”.

We have contacted Kaspersky for a comment, but are yet to receive a response. Although Microsoft didn’t investigate the provenance of the false positive, Batchelder’s team noticed that the software was picking up on code that was identical to lines in an actual malware file it had spotted days earlier.

By sharing all this data, security companies could more quickly identify new viruses and other malicious content. But the collaboration also allowed companies to borrow heavily from each other’s work instead of finding bad files on their own.

According to the report, Kaspersky carried out its sabotage by modifying versions of what Reuters describes as “an important piece of software commonly found in PCs” to appear malicious to the reverse-engineered software.