The dispute between the United States government through the FBI and Russian security company Kaspersky is well underway. American authorities have banned the company's antivirus from their services, while the FBI has just forwarded a request to the private sector to remove the Russian company's security products from their systems.
The FBI is asking US-based companies to abandon Kaspersky software, as it considers the Russian company to represent a “threat to national security,” according to a report by CyberScoop.
The FBI began pressuring US companies to remove Kaspersky from their systems earlier this year, and the source who disclosed this asked not to be named for obvious reasons. Companies in the energy sector and those using industrial control systems (ICS) such as supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) systems are at the top of the risk list.
Companies in the energy sector are under particular pressure from the FBI, as US authorities are concerned about recent attacks that disrupted the electricity grid in Ukraine and were linked to Russian hacking groups.
The reason the FBI is pushing to get rid of Kaspersky software is the security company's alleged ties to Russia.
The US agency claims that many of the security company's current employees are former Russian intelligence agents and that Russian laws could allow the government to control a local business and use it to spy on other nations.
Kaspersky has already responded to all these allegations, explaining that there are no ties not only to Russia but also to any other government. The Russian company has even offered to testify before the US Congress and hand over the source code of its software for further scrutiny.
