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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: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 16 2015, @07:40PM
Selfstarting exe
...and on top of that, depending on file extensions to determine executability--then hiding those by default.
The Klein flask of MICROS~1's logic is just ridiculous.
not sane privileges [...] arbitrary programs installing with root privilege
Those are the giant ones.
It's clear that salesmen are in charge in Redmond.
**How can we make make things render as quickly as possible?**
Oh, we'll just give kernel privileges to this non-trustworthy user-supplied data.
We will lose any semblance of security, but boy, the performance will be impressive--right up to the point where your system gets pwned and your actual tasks grind to a halt because the system is very busy servicing 243 rogue processes.
...and only Windoze people would think that constantly running anti-this and anti-that apps which chew up CPU cycles, RAM, and disk space (as well as bandwidth, continually downloading updates) is somehow an improvement on running rogue apps.
...and don't forget how it chews up your time sorting out false positives as well as figuring out how to deal with the problems from actual badness that your "security" apps missed because the rogue stuff hit your box before that was included in an update for your whiz-bang "security" app.
...and only Windoze people think that running anti-this and anti-that is a logical security method.
The way it is done properly is for the software devs to PATCH the flaws in their code and do that QUICKLY (rather than paste 3rd-party band-aids over those flaws).
If the devs audit their code and make sure they don't ship the flaws in the first place, that is even better.
Ridiculously complicated code makes this more difficult.
It actually is insecure by design
Windoze is the least-secure ecosystem in common use today.
It's as clear as the nose on your face, but fanboys will continue to deny it--as they watch the giant list of exploits scroll by while their anti-whatever app works to "secure" their systems.
-- gewg_