FWIW, the anti-Kaspersky train has been rolling for over three years. Since the time that Kaspersky revealed (after Symantec) global co-ordinated state sponsor

FWIW, the anti-Kaspersky train has been rolling for over three years. Since the time that Kaspersky revealed (after Symantec) global co-ordinated state sponsored malware programs such as Reign, created by the NSA and GCHQ. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/regin_kaspersky/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/12/05/regin_kaspersky/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regin_(malware) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regin_(malware) Or the time that Kaspersky publicly humiliated the NSA by revealing their hacking of hard drive firmware. https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/2/17/1364910/-Breaking-Kaspersky-Exposes-NSA-s-Worldwide-Backdoor-Hacking-of-Virtually-All-Hard-Drive-Firmware https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2015/2/17/1364910/-Breaking... https://www.scmagazineuk.com/is-nsa-worlds-most-advanced-threat-actor-revealed-by-kaspersky/article/537596/ https://www.scmagazineuk.com/is-nsa-worlds-most-advanced-thr... Since then, congressional hearings, committees, and US intel agencies' warnings of "security threats" from Kaspersky had been rolling out with regular frequency. Last year's ban was just a culmination of other efforts already underway. Kaspersky's role of tracking nation-state malware inflitrations gives them a position as a quasi-intelligence agency. US intelligence agencies hate Kaspersky because they out every program the US has going on, and because they operate out of Moscow. Literally every US intelligence agency has testified before Congress about how they specifically don't trust Kaspersky. https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/07/05/535651597/congress-casts-a-suspicious-eye-on-russias-kaspersky-lab https://www.npr.org/sections/parallels/2017/07/05/535651597/... So the US and its allies infiltrated their network and reverse engineered its software in order to find whatever dirt they could. https://www.observeit.com/blog/kaspersky-lab-nation-state-attack/ https://www.observeit.com/blog/kaspersky-lab-nation-state-at... https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kaspersky/ https://theintercept.com/2015/06/22/nsa-gchq-targeted-kasper... The information they have on global intelligence operations, their location outside of an ally's control, their insistence on embarrassing nation states' covert operations and exploits, and the fact that their software isn't the most secure (https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/23/google-ormandy-finds-kaspersky-0days/#2263a6b65493 https://www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2015/09/23/googl...) has given the US government enough reason to want them out of their infrastructure. It's just politically untenable.