Harm to rivals and users

Kaspersky antivirus deceived competitors, “infecting” safe files: Reuters

For several years, “Kaspersky Laboratory” has been deceiving competitors, her former employees say. The company's employees marked safe files as infected, as a result of which other antivirus developers began to consider these files dangerous. This, in turn, prevented users from competitors of the Laboratory. Reuters talks about attacks.

Former employees of Kaspersky Laboratory told how the company deceived competitors, putting ordinary files as dangerous. As a result, important user files were deleted. “[Our actions] harmed not only competitors, but also users of their products,” said one of the former employees of the Laboratory. Reuters interlocutors say that the goals were such developers of antivirus software like Microsoft, AVG, AVAST and others.

Some of the attacks were personally authorized by Evgeny Kaspersky. He believed that other developers steal the methods of work of his antivirus instead of fighting viruses themselves. The attacks lasted for more than 10 years, and their peak fell on the period from 2009 to 2013.

According to the former employees of the company, the engineers of Kaspersky Laboratory for weeks and months worked to find ways to harm competitors. They studied the methods of working antivirus programs of competitors to understand how they can be substituted.

Antivirus companies are working closely with each other, exchanging information about new threats, as well as providing information to the Virustotal antivirus aggregate (this service allows you to check the file immediately with all antiviruses). On the one hand, this allows you to more effectively deal with malicious programs. On the other hand, thanks to the exchange, you can substitute a competitor.

One of the ways used in Kaspersky Laboratory assumed a slight change in an important and common file (for example, drivers). Such a file was marked as malicious and sent to Virustotal. After that, antiviruses, which updated their databases taking into account this file, could accidentally mark as a malicious and unchanged file on computers of their users.

In Kaspersky Laboratory, all charges rejected. “The actions [of which we are accused] are unethical, dishonest, and their legality is in doubt,” the company emphasized. The Laboratory said that they themselves were faced with the fact that someone marked the safe files of Mail.ru and Steam programs as infected.

In Microsoft, AVG and Avast, they previously said that in recent years they have encountered the fact that someone has marked safe files as infected. However, now they refused to comment on the involvement of Kaspersky Laboratory in these incidents. According to representatives of anti -virus companies, now the problem of attacks described above is no longer so relevant, since the methods of file analysis are significantly improved.

“Although the security market is very competitive, confidence in the exchange of information [between companies] is an important part of the IT ecosystem,” Kaspersky laboratories said.

Reuters