Reuters has run a story claiming that Eugene Kaspersky directed developers at Kaspersky Lab to modify shared anti-virus definitions in order make other antivirus programs flag benign system files as malicious.
Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab, tried to damage rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious, according to two former employees.
The attacks allegedly targeted rivals Microsoft, AVG, and AVAST who Kaspersky felt were stealing.
Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab's co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said. "Eugene considered this stealing," said one of the former employees.
Microsoft, AVG and Avast indicated that they had found attempts to introduce false positives as detailed in a 2013 presentation by Dennis Batchelder from Microsoft.
Kaspersky denies the allegations and tweeted this as the story broke.
I don't usually read @reuters. But when I do, I see false positives. For the record: this story is a complete BS...
Read the full story here: http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/14/us-kaspersky-rivals-idUSKCN0QJ1CR20150814
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @02:46PM
You'd be surprised how much data you share with these companies and their proprietary software.
Even though both ClamAV/ClamWin kinda suck in detections, missing A LOT of malware, they've caught
Trojans where some of the big boys did not.
For example -- when I read Dr. Web's CureIt! program's privacy/use agreement, and all the shit they collect, I threw up in my mouth a little.