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posted by martyb on Wednesday July 12 2017, @01:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the Kaspersky-the-Friendly-Ghostsky dept.

According to emails from October 2009 obtained by Jordan Robertson and Michael Riley at Bloomberg it appears that Kaspersky Lab has been working with Russian Intelligence. Despite long standing rumours over these connections Eugene Kaspersky has always denied this to be the case, including as recently as last week in response to questions in the US Senate by Florida Republican Marco Rubio when he stated that "Claims about Kaspersky Lab's ties to the Kremlin are "unfounded conspiracy theories" and "total BS,"" on Reddit, and even offering to hand over the source code to the US Government for inspection.

While the exact nature of the co-operation with the FSB is still unclear, in the emails Kaspersky outlines a project undertaken in secret a year earlier "per a big request on the Lubyanka side," a reference to the FSB offices, that "includes both technology to protect against attacks (filters) as well as interaction with the hosters ('spreading' of sacrifice) and active countermeasures (about which, we keep quiet) and so on," Kaspersky wrote in one of the emails. Kaspersky Lab has confirmed that the emails are authentic. Whether this was legitimate work with the FSB in the prevention of cybercrime or securing FSB facilities or something more nefarious, it seems likely that this is not going to alleviate concerns over the use of their software putting further pressure on Kaspersky's business in other countries.


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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @05:35AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 12 2017, @05:35AM (#537960)

    An anti virus company is providing software solutions to a government enterprise!? What is this world coming to!? Thank god no good true blue blooded patriotic American companies like Microsoft, Cisco, Google, Facebook, AOL, Apple, or other companies would ever consider working with government agencies, let alone those intelligence agencies in the UNITED STATES OF FREEDOM. I bet those Russkie companies are even working with the government in domestic surveillance - making sure Putin and his Gestapo GB have unfettered access to the secrets and identities of the public online. Damn backwards Russkies. I bet they'd even come up with creepy dystopic names for them too, like PRISM [wikipedia.org]. Wait, that's not trademarked now is it?

    To be clear, I'm not stating that because one country drops the ball - it's okay for other countries to do so as well. But rather what is mentioned here is similar to declaring that the employees at the CIA Starbucks [businessinsider.com] are 'working with American intelligence.' They also change how they operate and go out of their way to meet government demands, but at the end of the day they're just serving coffee. So too in this case, at the end of the day they're just providing security solutions for a client - in this case against DDoS. The allegations were not that Kaspersky was servicing the Russian government, but rather that they were colluding in cahoots with the Russian government implicitly against the people. In other words, the allegations were that Kaspersky are doing what all the named American companies have been shown, beyond a doubt, to be doing. But to date, there's 0 evidence of such behavior. And the fact that we're now shifting the goal posts so hard left makes it look like that's probably because we now know that's because they're likely not engaging in such behavior.

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