![]() VirusTotal aggregates information on suspicious files and shares them with security companies. In an effort to prove that other companies were ripping off its work, Kaspersky said it ran an experiment: It created 10 harmless files and told VirusTotal that it regarded them as malicious. Kaspersky Lab in 2010 complained openly about copycats, calling for greater respect for intellectual property as data-sharing became more prevalent.Įmployees work at the headquarters of Kaspersky Labs, a company which specialises in the production of antivirus and internet security software, in Moscow July 29, 2013. But the collaboration also allowed companies to borrow heavily from each other’s work instead of finding bad files on their own. ![]() ![]() They licensed each other's virus-detection engines, swapped samples of malware, and sent suspicious files to third-party aggregators such as Google Inc's GOOGL.O VirusTotal.īy sharing all this data, security companies could more quickly identify new viruses and other malicious content. The opportunity for such trickery has increased over the past decade and a half as the soaring number of harmful computer programs have prompted security companies to share more information with each other, industry experts said. #Avast network inspector chinese mobile device how toTheir chief task was to reverse-engineer competitors’ virus detection software to figure out how to fool them into flagging good files as malicious, the former employees said. The former Kaspersky employees said company researchers were assigned to work for weeks or months at a time on the sabotage projects. “It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users’ computers.” “It was decided to provide some problems” for rivals, said one ex-employee. The two former Kaspersky Lab employees said the desire to build market share also factored into Kaspersky’s selection of competitors to sabotage. Kaspersky has won wide respect in the industry for its research on sophisticated Western spying programs and the Stuxnet computer worm that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear programme in 20. The Russian company is one of the most popular antivirus software makers, boasting 400 million users and 270,000 corporate clients. When contacted this week, they had no comment on the allegation that Kaspersky Lab had targeted them. “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.”Įxecutives at Microsoft, AVG and Avast previously told Reuters that unknown parties had tried to induce false positives in recent years. “Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing,” Kaspersky said in a statement to Reuters. Kaspersky Lab strongly denied that it had tricked competitors into categorizing clean files as malicious, so-called false positives. Both sources requested anonymity and said they were among a small group of people who knew about the operation. ![]() ![]() “Eugene considered this stealing,” said one of the former employees. Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology, they said. They said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft Corp MSFT.O, AVG Technologies NV AVG.N, Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers' PCs. ![]()
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