For more than ten years, Kaspersky, one of the largest IT security companies, trying to harm rivals in the market, so they can detect files “clean” as infected, writes Reuters citing former employees of the Russian company. Two former employees say that Evgeny Kaspersky had personally ordered the sabotage to put experts to work for several months, considering that a number of software copies rivals Russian. Kaspersky has vehemently denied. “Our company has not campaigned in secret to fool competitors to generate false-positive results in order to positively affect the market. Such actions are unethical, and their legality is questionable at best,” say people from Kaspersky, in a reply to Reuters.
Former employees, according to Reuters say that among the companies targeted include Microsoft, AVG and Avast and other rivals, inducing them into error to delete or disable important files on PCs cleint. Some campaigns have even been ordered by Evgeny Kaspersky, upset that some companies would mimic software instead develop their own version. Kaspersky boss believes it is theft and it have to take action.
Employees, who wished to remain anonymous, say they have been carefully selected the companies which were to be sabotaged and that some teams were tasked to deal with these things weeks, or even months at a time. Kaspersky experts were asked to examine the processes of reverse engineering (reverse engineering) to software rivals, so it can be determined to signal clean files as infected.
Kaspersky took advantage in these campaigns and that, in recent years, manufacturers IT security solutions have made massive exchange of information and put many more elements in common, collaboration helping companies better detect various threats, unless it would have remained each on their own.
Kaspersky is one of the best known companies in the industry, the solutions being used by 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients. The company is respected for espionage detected campaigns, is famous for disclosures related to “worm” Stuxnet that hit Iranian nuclear program in 2009 and 2010.
Furthermore, the company says that in November 2012 was victim of the attack, when an unknown third party to manipulate Kaspersky wrongly classify as malicious files from mail.ru and gaming from platform Steam. Evgeny Kasperski says on his blog, that the charges are ridiculous and she mocks Reuters journalists who have trusted in former employees who could say anything in anonymity. On a more serious note, the company boss says such accusations are gaudy and Kaspersky has since been the victim of attacks across industry and security software manufacturers face the problem of “false positives”.