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Kaspersky didn't exfiltrate anything. An NSA contractor brought home classified files and put them on a machine on the internet that had Kaspersky AV. The AV ta

Kaspersky didn't exfiltrate anything. An NSA contractor brought home classified files and put them on a machine on the internet that had Kaspersky AV. The AV tagged the files as malware and uploaded it to Kaspersky's servers to be analyzed. It's another ridiculous screw-up by the NSA that they had to cover for. https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/russian-hackers-stole-nsa-tools-contractor-who-used-kaspersky-software-n808101 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/russian-hackers-... Quote: "Not only is the work of the NSA and CIA increasingly visible, there is a certain aggression implied by this," he said. "It's a 'game-on' moment." Kaspersky, he said, should be treated as a hostile actor. Israel was inside Kaspersky's network, found the Russians looking for US files (or so they claim) which had been just hanging around on their servers for a year, and so they notified the NSA about the breach. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky-lab-israel-russia-hacking.html https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/10/technology/kaspersky-lab-... I don't believe any agency operates based on revenge. They operate based on politics. Can they really continue to fund this organization that is constantly pulling their pants down? Kaspersky's biggest flaw here is just having shit security.

linkregister 8y ago
Considering that non-malware related documents were reportedly taken, you're not telling the full story. You make some good points. That said, the politics of the NSA and the politics of Congress are often quite orthogonal and shouldn't be equated.
- mcguire 8y ago
  From the article: "However, the anti-Kaspersky train picked up steam following revelations last year of a bizarre incident in which the company slurped up classified documents and source code from the home computer of a National Security Agency contractor running Kaspersky Internet Security software. That contractor, Nghia Hoang Pho, pleaded guilty last year to willfully mishandling classified material by taking it home. "Kaspersky claimed the incident was an unintended byproduct of its routine malware scanning. The source code was for an NSA hacking tool, which Kaspersky’s product properly flagged for analysis by malware researchers. But because the code was bundled in a ZIP archive with the classified documents, Kaspersky’s software uploaded the entire thing. When Eugene Kaspersky realized what had happened, he ordered his researchers to immediately delete their copy of the documents and code, the company asserted in a blog post last year. “The archive was not shared with any third parties,” the company wrote." Presumably, it was an isolated incident and we can trust Kaspersky's statement about their actions. No?

linkregister 8y ago

Considering that non-malware related documents were reportedly taken, you're not telling the full story. You make some good points. That said, the politics of the NSA and the politics of Congress are often quite orthogonal and shouldn't be equated.

mcguire 8y ago
From the article: "However, the anti-Kaspersky train picked up steam following revelations last year of a bizarre incident in which the company slurped up classified documents and source code from the home computer of a National Security Agency contractor running Kaspersky Internet Security software. That contractor, Nghia Hoang Pho, pleaded guilty last year to willfully mishandling classified material by taking it home. "Kaspersky claimed the incident was an unintended byproduct of its routine malware scanning. The source code was for an NSA hacking tool, which Kaspersky’s product properly flagged for analysis by malware researchers. But because the code was bundled in a ZIP archive with the classified documents, Kaspersky’s software uploaded the entire thing. When Eugene Kaspersky realized what had happened, he ordered his researchers to immediately delete their copy of the documents and code, the company asserted in a blog post last year. “The archive was not shared with any third parties,” the company wrote." Presumably, it was an isolated incident and we can trust Kaspersky's statement about their actions. No?