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Kaspersky Software Banned From US Government Systems Over Concerns About Russia (betanews.com)
Mark Wilson writes: The Department of Homeland Security has told US government agencies to remove Kaspersky software from their systems. The directive was issued because of concerns about influence exerted over the company by the Russian government. Government agencies have been given three months to identify and start to remove Kaspersky's security products. Kaspersky has constantly denied connections to the Russian government, but the US is simply not willing to take the risk.
Will they try to use the Kaspersky uninstall tool and expect everything to be removed? Only a full clean reinstall of Windows will remove everything. And is there an independent tool to run to confirm that Kaspersky has actually been removed?
The only sane way you can ... distrust the fuck out of everything, measure it for network connections you can't trust, and decide if you really need that software.
Every state actor these days is doing shit like this. Which means you need to take some ownership of your security and act as if you have no assumption but to assume at least one government is trying to undermine your security.
What I don't get is how the idiots in the US get all butt-hurt when people try to hack them, yes entities like the NSA are aggressively hacking everyone else.
America has lost the right to complain about other entities hacking them, and quite frankly should lose the right to extradite people for hacking them, because US agencies are actively doing it to the rest of the world.
America has simply become a state you can't trust, because like childish assholes they like to act like their security supersedes all other considerations. I'm really looking forward to the day when someone burns the US security infrastructure to the ground.
Of all possible attack vectors into a system, antivirus software would have to be the most ideal mechanism for taking over or otherwise collecting data. By its very design it must have full reign of the system, read the data of every file accessed by any process, and have the ability to edit and delete any file on the system.
However, the most concerning part is that antivirus software must receive new functionality and data on a practically daily basis to detect and remove newly created malware. An antivirus program can take down its host system at any time by simply receiving a virus definition that causes it to remove or corrupt critical system files. It can also do the same targeting any specific application.
Personally I don't trust ANY antivirus company to wield that sort of power over my system.
Better known as 318230.