® Updated to addĬo-founder of the eponymous Russian security biz Eugene Kaspersky has hit back the warning. None of this appears to be washing in the West – and today's announcement by Germany won't help the company's position.
Kaspersky anti virus downloads verification#
These are said to include verification of binary equivalence ("rebuild the source code to make sure it corresponds to publicly available modules") and details of Kaspersky's Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) for its consumer and enterprise products. A page on Kaspersky's website says potential customers can review source code through one of three pre-defined programs. The company has occasionally repeated its promise of setting up transparency centers, similar to how Huawei has dealt with suspicious Western countries.
This explosive allegation served its evident purpose: Kaspersky was, as far as the US government was concerned, kaput, and its denials of espionage collusion fell on deaf ears. When he uploaded an exploit onto his home laptop in 2015, his Kaspersky antivirus functioned exactly as intended: it recognized the malware and uploaded a copy to Kaspersky's servers.Įnraged, the US said Kaspersky had handed the exploit to Russia's FSB spy agency, jailed Pho, and banned the use of Kaspersky across its entire government.ĭays after the Pho story first broke, however, rumors (started by the New York Times newspaper) began swirling that Israeli spies had hacked Kaspersky only to discover (so the story went) the infosec firm was working hand-in-glove with Russian spy agencies. Nghia Hoang Pho, who worked in the NSA's Tailored Access Operations (TAO) unit, was in the habit of taking his work home with him. In America's case, however, an NSA hacker's carelessness proved to be Kaspersky's undoing. This failed when the Dutch government said it was banning internal use of Kaspersky both Britain and the US did likewise. Like US-sanctioned enterprise infosec firm Positive Technology, Kaspersky tried to soothe fears in the West by moving its European base of operations to Switzerland in 2018.