Kaspersky Allegedly Produces Malware To Trick Competition (Report)

The folks over at Reuters have reported that two former employees of Moscow-based Kaspersky Labs have accused their previous employer of coming up with malware in order to trick its rivals into flagging and quarantining important, non-viral, files on the computers of their customers. It does sound rather cheeky of Kaspersky to do so at face value, but on the other hand, there is a serious breach of trust here if the allegation is proven to be true.

Kaspersky allegedly programmed malware that will inject malicious code into important PC files, where these files will naturally be flagged as a false positive – before the next appropriate action, such as quarantining or deleting it happens.

It seems that this order to churn out such malware was issued by Kaspersky Lab co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, as part of his revenge against the tinier fish in the pond. Eugene felt slighted, having accusing thoughts of his competitors copying his antivirus system instead of building one from scratch, and has judged them to be stealing. Reuters’ anonymous source shared, “It was decided to provide some problems for the other companies, It is not only damaging for a competing company but also damaging for users’ computers.”

Of course, Kaspersky Labs has vehemently denied such accusations, saying, “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.”

What do you think of the situation?

Edwin Kee
Categories: General
Tags: kaspersky, Malware