Kaspersky security software sales in Australia have started to slow according to resellers, this follows claims that the Russian software is used to spy on owners.
Questions are now being raised as to how long can Kaspersky survive the assault on its business, It’s already been thrown out of Best Buy stores in the USA and Harvey Norman in Australia.
THe Washington Post at the weekend claimed that Russian government hackers lifted details of U.S. cyber capabilities from a National Security Agency employee who was running the Kaspersky antivirus software on his computer.
The employee had taken classified material home to work on it on his computer, and his use of Kaspersky Lab antivirus software enabled Russian hackers to see his files, the individuals said. The case, which dates to 2015 and has not been made public, remains under investigation by federal prosecutors.
The NSA declined to comment on the breach.
The employee involved was a U.S. citizen born in Vietnam and had worked at Tailored Access Operations, the elite hacking division of the NSA that develops tools to penetrate computers overseas to gather foreign intelligence, said the individuals, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing case. He was removed from the job in 2015, but was not thought to have taken the materials for malicious purposes such as handing them to a foreign spy agency, they said.
The theft of the material enabled the Russian government to more easily detect and evade U.S. government cyberespionage operations, thwart defensive measures and track U.S. activities, the individuals said. It is the latest in a series of damaging breaches of the NSA in recent years and is among the first concrete indications of why the U.S. intelligence community believes that Kaspersky Lab software operates as a tool for Russian espionage.
The breach “serves as a stark warning — not just to the federal government, but to states, local governments and the public — of the serious dangers of using Kaspersky software,” said US Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-N.H.), a vocal critic of Kaspersky who has pushed for the software’s ban in federal networks.
The material the employee took included hacking tools he was helping to develop to replace others that were considered compromised following the breach of NSA material by former co
The Russian Company is close to being expelled from U.S. government networks and even private industry companies are being told to stop using the Russian company’s anti-virus tools.
At this stage there’s little detail on what role Kaspersky or its software played in the breach, however. In the worst case scenario for Kaspersky, it would’ve actively colluded with the Russian government, purposefully passing on data collected by its antivirus systems to pinpoint which computers contained NSA cyber tools, most likely those it researched, such as those produced by the Equation Group.
Kaspersky Lab was the first to detail the tools of that latter crew, widely believed to belong to the NSA and which a shady crew called the Shadow Brokers claimed to have stolen. The group subsequently leaked cyber tools, most notoriously those targeting Microsoft Windows that ended up being adapted to spread the WannaCry ransomware.
