Kaspersky Lab hit with accusations of faking malware to harm rivals

Starting over a decade back, Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab one of the largest security companies, tried to harm its market rivals by tricking their anti-virus software programme packages into classifying benign information as malicious, two former staff, Reuters reported.

According to the staff, the key marketing campaign focused Microsoft Corp, AVG Technologies NV, Avast Software and different rivals, and fooled some of them into deleting or disabling necessary information on their clients' PCs.

Kaspersky Lab's co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, had ordered a few of the assaults, partly in a bid to hit back at smaller rivals that he felt had been aping his software program as an alternative rather than creating their very own know-how, they stated.

According to one of the staff, Eugene viewed this as stealing. Both sources requesting anonymity said they had been amongst a small group of people in the know of the matter.

According to the company, there was much fluff and air in the story.

"Contrary to allegations made in a Reuters news story, Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and illegal," said the statement.

"Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false."

The firm went on to add that its efforts were about the exact opposite, and it shared information and expertise with rivals.

It believed that the report was based, at least partly, on a study carried out in 2010 that saw Kaspersky create false positives. The study looked to expose the weaknesses of some systems and the firm was open with its work, and discussed the findings with the rest of the industry.

"In 2010, we conducted a one-time experiment uploading only 20 samples of non-malicious files to the VirusTotal multi-scanner, which would not cause false positives as these files were absolutely clean, useless and harmless," the firm said.

"After the experiment, we made it public and provided all the samples used to the media so they could test it for themselves. We conducted the experiment to draw the security community's attention to the problem of insufficiency of multi-scanner-based detection when files are blocked only because other vendors detected them as being malicious, without actual examination of the file activity."