Kaspersky Labs accused of faking malware to hurt competition

[xrobwx71]

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - 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.

They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp , AVG Technologies NV , Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers' PCs.

Source

 

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Kaspersky's Rebuttal

Contrary to allegations made in a Reuters news story, Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and illegal. Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false. As a member of the security community, we share our threat intelligence data and IOCs on advanced threat actors with other vendors, and we also receive and analyze threat data provided by others. Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat data exchange is a critical part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and we fight hard to help ensure that this exchange is not compromised or corrupted.

Read more here.

 

[Circaflex]

I think this quote, sums up this nonsense pretty well... 

Symantec, acknowledged similar attacks on Symantec’s products in a post to Twitter, saying, “We had investigated these attacks but could not find out who was behind them. We had some suspects, Kaspersky was not one of them.”

 

 

One of the former Kaspersky Lab employee told Reuters that Kaspersy felt that some malware providers were too closely copying Kaspersky Lab’s software, and “Eugene considered this stealing.” 

The above would be completely childish.

To be completely honest, what is more likely
1.)Two former, disgruntled employees are butt-hurt because they got fired/ got in trouble for something.
2.)Only two of....how many? employees came forward.

So two ex-employees told Reuters that this was a practice. I also see no posted evidence just claims.
So then Arstechnica writes and article about the Reuters story, in an 'well if they reported it, it must be true' type story.
Seems more like click-bait articles than anything with substance.
"you won't believe what these two former employees said!"
"Antivirus companies hate them! Kaspersky uses this one weird trick!"

and so on...

 

How do these articles get published without citing their sources in the first place? I thought that's what they learn in their expensive journalism schools.