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US Agency Revokes All State Discounts For Kaspersky Products (thebaltimorepost.com)
The U.S. General Services Administration has removed Kapersky Lab from its list of approved vendors for federal systems, which also eliminates the discounts it previously offered to state governments. Long-time Slashdot reader Rick Zeman writes:
"The agency's statement suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Russian government backdoor access to the systems it protects, though they offered no explanation or evidence of it," reports the Washington Post. Kaspersky, of course, denies this, offering their source code up for U.S. Government review... "Three current and former defense contractors told The Post that they knew of no specific warnings circulated about Kaspersky in recent years, but it has become an unwritten rule at the Pentagon not to include Kaspersky as a potential vendor on new projects."
"The lack of information from the GSA underscores a disconnect between local officials and the federal government about cybersecurity," the Post reports, adding that "the GSA's move on July 11 has left state and local governments to speculate about the risks of sticking with the company or abandoning taxpayer-funded contracts, sometimes at great cost."
The Post also quotes a cybersecurity expert at a prominent think tank -- the Center for Strategic and International Studies -- who believes that "it's difficult, if not impossible" for a company like Kaspersky to be headquartered in Moscow "if you don't cooperate with the government and the intelligence services."
"The lack of information from the GSA underscores a disconnect between local officials and the federal government about cybersecurity," the Post reports, adding that "the GSA's move on July 11 has left state and local governments to speculate about the risks of sticking with the company or abandoning taxpayer-funded contracts, sometimes at great cost."
The Post also quotes a cybersecurity expert at a prominent think tank -- the Center for Strategic and International Studies -- who believes that "it's difficult, if not impossible" for a company like Kaspersky to be headquartered in Moscow "if you don't cooperate with the government and the intelligence services."
was russian security software on the gsa in the first place? that's like outsourcing handling of the 'football' and cloud storage of launch codes to the fsb.
They all cooperate to some degree with all larger governments. They do not have a choice, governments have far too much power simply because they are large customers. Assuming otherwise is exceptionally naive. Of course, there are limits. No AV vendor will allow known government malware (US, Chinese, Russian, etc.) through. They cannot afford that. Making it easier for unknown malware is a different thing. In the end, as long as the exposure-risk for them is small, AV vendors will cooperate with the criminally-minded government agencies that modern governments seem to treasure so much. Governments, unfortunately, are yet again in the process of becoming the enemy of not only their own citizens, just like history never happened.
The one thing we can now be reasonably sure of is that Kaspersky will now stop cooperating with the US government, which, in my book, makes their products better than what the competition has.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
The possibility that Kapersky Lab is beholden to the Russian government is real.
Yes, yes, I know the same can be said for American based "security" companies, but it's more likly they are beholden to American spy agencies.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
"The agency's statement suggested a vulnerability exists in Kaspersky that could give the Russian government backdoor access to the systems it protects, though they offered no explanation or evidence of it," reports the Washington Post. Kaspersky, of course, denies this, offering their source code up for U.S. Government review... "Three current and former defense contractors told The Post that they knew of no specific warnings circulated about Kaspersky in recent years, but it has become an unwritten rule at the Pentagon not to include Kaspersky as a potential vendor on new projects."
I'm not a security expert, but I don't know that this would necessarily sooth me. For example, perhaps the "backdoor" is devilishly obscured. Or, perhaps future exploits of a particularly tricky and secret nature will mysteriously not be added to whatever library Kaspersky's stuff uses. And then there is the issue of regular software updates, does the US government have to check the code with a fine tooth comb every time - this alone would be problematic.
I mean, come on! To imagine that the Russians would not at least TRY to leverage the Kaspersky install base is ignorant.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Well then, we'll just switch to the cheaper Chinese stuff.
Have gnu, will travel.
"...they're going to use Symantec? Score!"
https://www.us-cert.gov/ncas/a...
Software built by Russian companies is backdoored by Russian spooks.
Software built by American companies is backdoored by American spooks.
Software built by Chinese companies is backdoored by Chinese spooks.
Does this surprise anyone at all?
On telling the world about the Equation Group, Stuxnet and a lot of other malware.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
i wonder what the US govt thinks of DR.Web - less known Russian based AV vendor
https://www.privateinternetacc...
Only one party voted against outsourcing it outside Sweden, the Sweden democrats. Another party decided to not vote at all, the Left party, possibly they were against it but refused to vote like the Sweden democrats with that result. The rest voted for it. .. and well.. that was good?
when the next big war starts, a lot of computers all over the world are rapidly going to get pwned.
once computers and the internet become "the enemy" people are just gonna have to turn them off!
as long as people only use computers and the internet for entertainment, everything will be fine. if people start using computers and the internet for important things like critical infrastructure or national defence then there will be big trouble!
Yeah, good thing Hillary wasn't elected. She wouldn't have been a proper doormat for Putin.
National origin doesn't matter, people simply can't have full faith in closed source. All this propagandizing does is make modern man more equivalent to the cave man. If Kaspersky is offering source review with compilation on trusted systems, with sample submissions and the like running through trusted networks, then it's probably more trustworthy than others. People will remain clubbing it out like cave men, until they fundamentally change their markets and valuations, along with their software. Software bound to the confines of a society thriving on corruption bleeds that same corruption. Our own abhorrence towards such a state of being should inspire us to try and change it for the better, despite the likelihood of ending up as its victims ourselves.
Thanks for posting the stupidest thing I've read so far today.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Better: "US Govt. Removes Kaspersky from Approved Vendors List".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Our network is a critical infrastructure.
Nearly all communication ends up on the internet in some way.
A nation wide internet outage would cripple us, and make us prone to physical attack and demoralized the nation.
This isn't the 1980's where networked computers are used by a few egg heads to discuss Star Trek anymore.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
The US Government MUST of, at-least internally, had discussions about this very subject before all the Russian hacking came around. I mean Kaspersky has been around for at-least a decade, plenty of time to root everyone PC. I am not saying Kaspershy is Putin's lap dog, but I want to know what the discussions were before this whole fiasco happened and what evidence shown that Kaspersky is dangerous now.
I mean it feels like Putin is having us run around in circles while all he is doing is sitting having a vodka:P/p?
National origin doesn't matter, people simply can't have full faith in closed source.
People can't have full faith in open source either unless they are either capable of reviewing all the code themselves or can somehow establish a trusted chain of custody for all the code and tools to compile it. Most people cannot do the former and only large organizations realistically have the resources to do the later. There are undeniably huge advantages to open source but code security doesn't stand up to strict scrutiny in real world use for non-trivial use cases. I don't compile my software like most people and I'm not remotely qualified to review the code. So from that standpoint there is essentially no difference to me between open and closed source as an end user. There are great advantages to open source but this isn't one of them.