Eugene Kapersky is big fan of going to bathhouses with Russian FSB officials. Also unlike many other Russian companies he refused to relocate offices out of Russia when full-scale war began.
There’s a plethora of cia, nsa, “what have you” guys at OpenAI, Google, Meta, you name it — should every other country in the world ban US software?
Or are there “good” intelligence officers and “bad”?
The moment some backdoor is discovered in Kaspersky, it is done as a product all over the world. That’s the best protection about any alleged government connections exploiting the software.
The notion of open market, competition, democracy is only exercised when it is your products that should undermine the locals.
The moment it is not, you start hearing stuff like “overcapacity” (what a nice term) of china manufacturing — what a hypocrisy.
As soon as US starts loosing the positions, it wriggles just as any “dictatorship” protecting its interest by quickly dismissing the free market as it needs.
Obviously ClamAV only does what's in it code, but pretty much all proprietary AV software collect samples by default based on rules deployed by developer.
Windows Defender do have automatic sample submission, but according to documentation only automatically submit files that are "safe" to not no contain PII:
It might request user approval to submit non-executables, but again we can't know when and why Microsoft might decide to override defaults. Technically data collection pipeline is here.
> I mean the AV software being used as a malicious agent.
See the problem: there is absolutely no way to tell whatever AV software uploading your sensetive documents to it's servers for legit reasons or because it's spying on you.
> The notion of open market, competition, democracy is only exercised when it is your products that should undermine the locals.
Russia is no longer part of open market and it's not a democracy. There is absolutely no reason to make business with any of companies based in there just like there is no reason to work with companies from North Korea.
Companies from Russia like Jetbrains that wanted to work on global market left the country, relocated their staff and closed offices. Kaspersky choose to stay so his company can now work for local market instead and might be sell some AV to North Korea.
SXX, you actually didn't answer his question while addressing his underlying jab, so I'll take a crack.
Crucial components in the security profession are trust, and managed risk. Companies that don't pass the sniff test are simply discriminated against - regardless of circumstances.
The US is looking out at the world again and trying to influence it. And the common man is bombarded with western military exceptionalism propaganda. Why would the USA allow any avenue for its currency to flow into a Russian firm? It was only a matter of time for something like this to occur.
The problem is you won't need to discover a backdoor. A security program can simply not catch a targeted set of threats.
Russia is the most sanctioned country in the world. That's economically bad for everyone; just less bad for the US than Russia. The argument that this is designed to help US companies is... crazy.
> The moment some backdoor is discovered in Kaspersky, it is done as a product all over the world.
This is unfortunately not true. Maybe only in the West. Cisco has backdoors since years. Kaspersky just uncovered an Apple backdoor, that's why US is so upset.
> should every other country in the world ban US software?
For context, I'm not an American or European, and my home country is allied with Russia. That being said, the US is not just like the Russia, no matter how badly Putin wants the world to believe that.
Why do you think so? In my opinion these countries are equally bad. The western support for Ukraine is huge only because the west is against Russia, they could stop the war but they didn't.
In the current world diplomacy is a joke, countries and their diplomats are unable to find a peaceful solutions. People are dying on both sides ( Ukraine-Russia, Israel-Palestine, ... ) while the world watches.
The media also spread hateful propaganda on all sides of conflicts, politicians make hateful comments. Nobody cares.
So what's your proposal for how they should do that?
In particular: precisely which of Putin's most recently dictated terms do you think they should force Ukraine to agree to -- in order obtain this "peace" that you say is easily available?
Good riddance. EU should do the same.