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posted by martyb on Thursday September 14 2017, @09:48AM   Printer-friendly
from the prudence-or-paranoia? dept.

The Washington Post is reporting U.S. moves to ban Kaspersky software in federal agencies amid concerns of Russian espionage:

Acting Homeland Security secretary Elaine Duke ordered that Kaspersky Lab software be barred from federal civilian government networks, giving agencies a timeline to get rid of it, according to several officials familiar with the plan who were not authorized to speak publicly about it. Duke ordered the scrub on the grounds that the company has connections to the Russian government and its software poses a security risk.

[...] "The risk that the Russian government, whether acting on its own or in collaboration with Kaspersky, could capitalize on access provided by Kaspersky products to compromise federal information and information systems directly implicates U.S. national security."

[...] The directive comes months after the federal General Services Administration, the agency in charge of government purchasing, removed Kaspersky from its list of approved vendors. In doing so, the GSA suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Kremlin backdoor access to the systems the company protects.

Someone that is in a position to know all about it tells me that Kaspersky doesn't detect malware created by the Russian Business Network. My fear is that if I named that someone, the RBN will give that someone a bad hair day.

[Ed. addition follows]

The full text of the DHS notice is available at https://www.dhs.gov/news/2017/09/13/dhs-statement-issuance-binding-operational-directive-17-01.

Previously:
FBI Reportedly Advising Companies to Ditch Kaspersky Apps.


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  • (Score: 5, Informative) by nobu_the_bard on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:08PM (1 child)

    by nobu_the_bard (6373) on Thursday September 14 2017, @01:08PM (#567765)

    I have used the Rescue Disk in the past. Its okay but its showing its age. It doesn't work on some newer stuff.

    Kaspersky's TDSSkiller has been a lifesaver but overall antivirus products are not as relevant as they used to be.

    If a system gets owned hard enough, its way too hard to fix it sometimes - better to restore from backups and patch the vulnerability they used or just rebuild from scratch with patches applied.

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  • (Score: 1) by anubi on Friday September 15 2017, @05:00AM

    by anubi (2828) on Friday September 15 2017, @05:00AM (#568289) Journal

    Thanks for the reply.

    Second that on TDSSkiller. As for myself, I now make a new disk image backup with Clonezilla whenever I do a significant change in the OS, otherwise I do simple incremental backups for my specific user directory. I started doing that when I saw these "cryptolocker" type proggies going around. The external USB drives are so inexpensive these days that I buy a new drive to make the latest disk image onto, just so that if my latest backup is also corrupted, I have the ones before that were likely made before the malware got ingested.

    --
    "Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [KJV: I Thessalonians 5:21]