News
Rahul Kashyup, Bromium: Kaspersky Lab accused of sabotaging rivals with fake malware
August 2015 by Rahul Kashyup, Chief Security Architect and SVP of Security & Solutions Engineering at endpoint security specialists Bromium
It emerged today that Russian cyber-security firm, Kaspersky, has come under fire after former employees accused the company of creating fake malware and viruses to trick their competitors.
Commenting on this, Rahul Kashyup, Chief Security Architect and SVP of Security & Solutions Engineering at endpoint security specialists Bromium, said:
“If true, this news is indeed a jolt for the security industry – especially the Anti-Virus industry. The AV malware samples exchanged amongst vendors is based on trust, and this report claims that was breached. The ramifications are quite high – many users suffered in this process with crippled PC’s and many firms actually lost business. Besides the huge impact of the claim, there are two other issues this report brings out – the challenges of reliably attributing and the fragility of anti-virus ‘system’.
To prove that this story is indeed true, reliable facts need to be presented that provide legit evidence against Kaspersky. I doubt it’ll be easy for anyone to reliably attribute the act directly to Kaspersky (unless the informants did it themselves and stored reliable evidence at the time of crime). Reliable attribution on the internet is hard and tedious. It’s not like traditional crime.
This also exposes to the fragility of the entire malware sample distribution system. As the report claims – a hole in the system was uncovered and plugged after large scale damage was observed. The entire Anti-Virus industry is about reacting after damage, this act further proves yet another flaw in the model."
