FBI advises companies to drop Kaspersky Lab as it is filled with Russian spies

[Elixer]

I say don't use any of these companies... They all want kernel access.

The reason why companies should ditch the company's products, according to the FBI, is first that Kaspersky Lab is filled with employees who used to work in Russian intelligence agencies or people that have close ties with those agencies, although, the same is true for Western cybersecurity firms and their respective intelligence agencies too. Secondly, the FBI argues, current Russian surveillance laws are too broad and vague allowing significant access and manipulation by Russian intelligence agencies into the workings of companies based in Russia, such as Kaspersky Lab. According to critics, these accusations are part of a much larger geopolitical game, and this is also what Kaspersky Lab describes as what is going and that it does not have any link with any government or spy agency.

https://www.neowin.net/news/the-fbi...persky-lab-as-it-is-filled-with-russian-spies

 

[Mike64]

FBI advises companies to drop Kaspersky Lab

And of course, this is beyond doubt an "honest and unbiased recommendation" the FBI is offering "free or at a significant discount"... /

 

[PeterRoss]

The more this continues, the more I can't understand, why pursue Kaspersky to such lengths. Sure, a lot of employees are for government workers, but there are LITERALLY no real strong evidence that they are doing what FBI is implying.

 

[Elixer]

Well...

The confirmation comes via more hacking activity, this time by Israelis who were apparently embedded in the antivirus company's systems prior to the 2015 Russian hack of an NSA contractor who had taken classified information back home. The New York Times also confirmed, albeit via anonymous sources, that Israel was in fact behind the 2014 hack of the Russian cyber security firm, as most experts had suspected.
During their time rummaging around the Kaspersky network, the Israeli spies reportedly discovered, in real time, some fellow spies, though of Russian heritage. As per the report, the Russians had been converting Kaspersky's antivirus, which is installed on more than 400 million devices around the world, into a form of Google search engine for state secrets, scanning systems for code words pertaining to US intelligence efforts.

All of which brings us back to the loss of NSA secrets through a contractor. The contractor was found to have Kaspersky software installed on his computer and, after the Israeli hackers shared their intel with their NSA counterparts, it was believed that the Russians had used the same technique to steal confidential data from the contactor's computer.