Russian anti-virus company Kaspersky Lab has been increasingly vilified in the US for acquiring classified US government programs. This has led to a full ban on Kaspersky software on federal PCs, and several retails dropping the wildly popular program.
Kaspersky Lab’s own internal investigation into the matter revealed that was indeed the case, in as much as its antivirus software “accidentally” swept up NSA malware and its adjoining source code during a 2014 malware scan, even though that malware was itself classified.
This means, however, that the antivirus software was doing exactly what it was supposed to do, sweeping up computer malware, and collecting data for analysis to improve their ability to fight off such attacks in the future.
And that’s exactly what customers are paying for with such companies’ software, and the big problem the US has with Kaspersky seems not to be that it is Russia-based, but that it worked so well it detected their brand new malicious software.
Kaspersky is consistently in the top handful of antivirus makers for rate of detection, and this fact seems to be what has made them a target.