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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, @02:32PM
Exactly, AV is a protectionist racket. Nobody asked for them... they just showed up.
(Score: 0, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @07:07PM
The niche for that industry wouldn't even exist if wasn't for MICROS~1's bug-riddled, insecure-by-design products.
Even in spite that, if, after being notified of the holes in their stuff, Redmond actually PATCHED their stuff QUICKLY, again, there would be no need for 3rd-party band-aids.
The problem there is that MICROS~1 makes their stuff unnecessarily complicated--in contrast to the Unix philosophy. [wikipedia.org]
...and, apparently, it requires months and months to construct a patch for their stuff and test that for a reasonable number of the possible error modes. [google.com]
-- gewg_
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 15 2015, @08:36PM
Color me thoroughly shocked.
-- gewg_