Russian company Kaspersky Lab is one of the best-known antivirus companies with operations in more than 200 countries worldwide. But according to Reuters , the company has been creating fake malware for more than 10 years in an attempt to gain an advantage over its competitors. In short, one of the world's largest security companies tried to harm its competitors by tricking them into labeling harmless files as malware .
The above complaint is made by two former Kaspersky Lab employees and they say that Kaspersky Lab made this move because it believed that smaller competitors in its field of activity were stealing its technology. The former employees say that Kaspersky Lab's targets were Avast, AVG,Microsoft and others. The former employees claim that some of the attacks were carried out on the direct orders of the company's own co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky.
By creating fake malware, Kaspersky Lab tricked its competitors’ software into isolating or deleting important files on users’ computers. It did this by falsifying important files on PCs so that they looked like malware, and then submitting them to Google ’s VirusTotal malware aggregator . Google’s database was used to inform other antivirus solutions about which files were dangerous. Ultimately, Kaspersky Lab’s competitors’ products considered these important files to be dangerous.
Kaspersky Lab denied the existence of the secret 10-year-long campaign and told Reuters that such practices are “unethical,” “dishonest,” and their “legality” is at least questionable:
“Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.”
According to former Kaspersky Lab employees, the company reverse-engineered its competitors' software to drive false reports. The company created files that looked like the real thing—but weren't—and then used VirusTotal to trick its competitors into reporting false reports.
It is noteworthy that in 2010, over a period of one and a half weeks, 10 Kaspersky Lab files were declared dangerous by 14 other security companies. Former employees say it was sabotage, while Kaspersky Lab says it was an experimentto prove that its competitors were copying its technology.
more about the case of fake malware from Kaspersky, according to the allegations of its former employees, in the Reuters report.
Source: pcmag
