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I have to ask: Is there any concrete evidence against Kaspersky doing anything remotely concerning since this whole charade against them started in 2015 or is
by r3bl 9y ago
I have to ask:
Is there any concrete evidence against Kaspersky doing anything remotely concerning since this whole charade against them started in 2015 or is it still "they're Russian, so they must be doing something bad" scenario?
EDIT: Fuck if I understand why people like
JohnStrange, revelation and ryanlol are downvoted in their replies to this comment. They're on topic.
- X86BSD 9y agoIt’s a witch hunt slash scapegoat. Just as is Russian “collusion” with trump. Absolutely zero evidence at all only unnamed sources and speculation. All the money wasted on this politics garbage sigh.
- cisanti 9y agoThe witch hunt has gone so crazy that even the author of faceapp than removes make up was somehow tied to "Russian troll farms". It's sickening.
- cisanti 9y agoWhy are you downvoting me, people? What is that I said was wrong?!
- krapp 9y agoI didn't downvote you, but you're responding in agreement to an obvious troll and spreading propaganda about a vast left-wing "witch hunt" which only serves to dilute and further degrade what little intellectual value this thread might have possessed.
- jonknee 9y agoWhat's your source for this? I remember they got a lot of flack for introducing race changing filters (AKA digital blackface). Thinking that was a good idea is pretty sickening.
- orf 9y ago> Just as is Russian “collusion” with trump. Absolutely zero evidence Well... not quite.
- ryanlol 9y agoCan you link to any evidence suggesting foul play on Kasperskys part? edit: This question was far more reasonable before the parent comment was edited.
- forapurpose 9y ago[deleted]
- ryanlol 9y agoReally only describes standard AV co practices.
- orf 9y agoI was responding to the comment regarding collision between the Trump campaign and Russia
- ctrl-j 9y agoI mean... it was all over the news? https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky-lab-israel-russia-hacking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky-lab-...
- ryanlol 9y agoYou could write a very similar article about any AV company. I've personally been automatically scanning data shared by various¹ AV companies for sensitive documents. I only store files not detected as malware by any scanners, and filter out large usually boring files (i.e. videos, audio). I also make an effort to filter out publicly available documents by googling them. So far I've gathered over 20TB of data. So far I've found: Entire customer database of a Swedish bank Thousands of git repositories Hundreds of passport scans Tens of gigabytes of sensitive medical documents Tens of gigabytes of internal government documents Payroll data for hundreds of thousands of people Entire email inboxes, both government and corporate. Hundreds of website dbs in various formats This is just off the top of my head, I could keep going for a while. I've got a searchable archive of tens of millions of clean pdfs, word docs, excel spreadsheets, powerpoints and so on. All pulled from users computers by their AV software. ¹ Not including Kaspersky, but including many US firms.
- ctrl-j 9y ago> Just as is Russian “collusion” with trump. Absolutely zero evidence at all only unnamed sources and speculation. Just out of curiosity, what makes you think there is zero evidence? How would we know what evidence Mueller's team has uncovered? How do you reconcile all of the interactions between the trump campaign and the various Russian entities involved?
- X86BSD 9y agoNone of which were illegal. There has been zero evidence uncovered or produced by anyone in 10 months. This is nothing but a witch hunt to demonize some idiot the left hates. It’s transparent and disappointing. While the left gets away with Benghazi and uranium one. There is no justice only the decision of those in power.
- maskedinvader 9y agoThere is no justice only the decision of those in power. -do you really want that power to be in the tiny hands of an orange clown ? #justcurious
- thatguy0900 9y agoAs much as you may dislike him, please don't use this kind of discourse on HN.
- maskedinvader 9y agojust to clarify ? the question itself has merit ? no ? the description of the commander in chief however may not have shown respect, for which I accept your comment and take the downvotes on the chin.
- orf 9y ago> away with Benghazi Wasn't Benghazi investigated to death by the right for an absurdly long time? Why do you think nothing was found? I'm not sure if your willfully trolling or actually believe the misinformation you are spreading, and I'm not sure which is worse.
- ihaveahadron 9y agoThis is hacker news where we are smart which includes proper grammar. Why did you write out the word "slash", don't you know it's sybolized with a / sign. Learn to philosophalize better.
- sctb 9y agoWe've asked you many times to follow the guidelines. Please re-read them and start posting civilly and substantively or we'll ban the account. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- matt4077 9y agoIt's a security company run mostly by ex-KGB and dependent on the good will of an administration willing to very publicly murder their opponents[0], and not bound by anything resembling rule of law. So yes, it is possible, maybe even likely, that Kasperky is doing nothing shady and has only the best intentions. It's also somewhat irresponsible to entrust them with any data of value. Those two things are not mutually exclusive.
- 55555 9y agoPerhaps I'm confused, but did you mean to add a footnote/citation ([0])?
- matt4077 9y agoYeah. Just google for Polonium. They murdered someone, and made sure the victim, and the whole world, knew exactly who was behind it.
- FeepingCreature 9y agoUsually if you leave a footnote[0], you have to actually include the note in the footer of your comment. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Note_(typography) Like so.
- nasredin 9y agoProbably misspelled, from memory: Litvienko (Polonium) Politovskaya (Journalist) Nemtsov (Politician) And no, you do not need to leave a note (IMHO) since the fact that Russian government murders its critics is common knowledge.
- syockit 9y ago[0] is just a short form for [citation needed]
- revelation 9y agoThe best part of all of this is how there is all this media coverage on a fricking antivirus, but nobody seems all too concerned with the NSA losing more secrets. It's like incident #100, maybe Kaspersky is the KGB, good on them since they are clearly more competent than the NSA. Maybe we can poach them?
- philipov 9y agoStands to reason that the media coverage is a smoke screen to eat up attention on the issue. Easier to give people a boogeyman so they don't have as much energy to spend on noticing the really important problems. And our media outlets will happily run with anything that produces those sweet clicks.
- revelation 9y agoOur media outlets will happily run anything the government tells them. Here is the line from that infamous NYT article: "The current and former government officials who described the episode spoke about it on condition of anonymity because of classification rules." And now you know why Snowden wouldn't touch the NYT with 10 foot pole. This isn't "current and former government officials" committing a felony and treason to leak information to the NYT, no, they are just telling that reporter the NSA press report with a hushed voice.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- JohnStrange 9y agoI suspect there is a secret background story, like every so often when intelligence agencies are involved. Maybe Kaspersky didn't cooperate with the NSA as much as they'd wished for, or Russian intelligence interfered to prevent this. It looks to me like somebody is holding a very special grudge against this company. I'm merely speculating, of course. Personally, I never take ordinary public announcements or claims from intelligence agencies at face value, since they have plenty of reasons to lie and disinform. That doesn't entail that their secret reports are bogus, of course, and senate hearings are also reliable. I've followed the senate hearings close enough to be reasonably certain that the US intelligence community is right about the accusations concerning Russian meddling in politics in the US and the EU. But that's a different case, people were testifying under oath in front of senate committees and senators from both parties who went to meetings behind closed doors were also convinced of the (classified) evidence. As for Kaspersky, the information is unreliable and my personal guess is that whatever happened wasn't their fault. If someone has malware on his machine, it's the job of the antivirus software to detect and analyze it. If at all, the story has increased my overall trust in the technical quality of Kaspersky software. Another speculation that I find overall credible is that since Snowden's revelations there is some concerted effort to further discredit the NSA in order to weaken their ability to operate. If that's so, then this campaign seems to be quite successful.
- odiroot 9y agoWatching US situation from outside it's seems there's an urgent need for some kind of a bad guy. Kaspersky is just easy target and apparently three-letter-agencies have means to steer the media to pursue this direction.
- whoopdedo 9y agoRemember last year when Kaspersky accused[1] Microsoft of anti-trust for disabling their antivirus? And Microsoft admitted it was done in the name of compatibility.[2] Something about that seemed fishy to me because none of the other AV venders were complaining. Was Microsoft told to intentionally sabotage Kaspersky? [1] https://www.computerworld.com/article/3141470/security/kaspersky-founder-calls-out-microsoft-for-av-shenanigans.html https://www.computerworld.com/article/3141470/security/kaspe... [2] https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/20/15836208/microsoft-kaspersky-eu-anti-virus-complaint-response https://www.theverge.com/2017/6/20/15836208/microsoft-kasper...
- londons_explore 9y agoThat sounds like a legit software incompatibility to me. Kaspersky was probably using some private API they shouldn't have been using, and when Microsoft changed the API or changed the way it worked, they had to disable Kaspersky or computers would no longer boot up. When companies do that, they nearly always reach out to the affected vendors with advance warning so the vendor can do a rushed fix, but repeat offenders, or issues detected very late in the game before release can end up with no notice.
- gspetr 9y ago> Watching US situation from outside it's seems there's an urgent need for some kind of a bad guy. How else would you justify all that Defense budget spending? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomber_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missile_gap
- roywiggins 9y agoThe simplest argument to make is that, regardless of whether the top people at Kaspersky are gleefully collaborating with the Russian government, they probably are required to give the Russian security service a backdoor to their networks as a condition of existing. Given what we know about the feds installing black boxes in ISPs' networks here in the US- a country nominally committed to the rule of law- it seems somewhat naive to think that the Russian government doesn't have access to Kaspersky servers. Does that make Kaspersky uniquely evil? Probably not. Do the feds have an agreement with Microsoft to take a peek at anything they turn up from a foreign intelligence service? I don't know. It wouldn't be too surprising.
- daxorid 9y ago> Fuck if I understand why people like JohnStrange, revelation and ryanlol are downvoted The Hacker News community largely gets its non-hacker news from CNN, the NYT, HuffPo, etc. As mainstream US media parrots whatever the FVEY IC tells them to, it's not surprising that most HN voters end up uncritically believing the Russia-Is-Evil narrative from the same IC that conducted MKULTRA and sold us a war predicated on the lie that Saddam was loaded up with WMDs. Downvoting any and all dissent from CIA psyops is the natural consequence of this. Because, patriotism, or something.
- willstrafach 9y agoYou really don't believe there is a possibility that some others have assessed all available facts and simply disagree with the conclusion that you've evidently come to?