Dodging Russian Spies, Customers Are Ripping Out Kaspersky (thedailybeast.com)

From a report: Multiple U.S. security consultants and other industry sources tell The Daily Beast customers are dropping their use of Kaspersky software all together, particularly in the financial sector, likely concerned that Russian spies can rummage through their files. Some security companies are being told to only provide U.S. products. And former Kaspersky employees describe the firm as reeling, with department closures and anticipation that researchers will jump ship soon. "We are under great pressure to only use American products no matter the technical or performance consequences," said a source in a cybersecurity firm which uses Kaspersky's anti-virus engine in its own services. The Daily Beast granted anonymity to some of the industry sources to discuss internal deliberations, as well as the former Kaspersky employees to talk candidly about recent events.

Comments

All together?

[Stormwatch]

customers are dropping their use of Kaspersky software all together

All of them simultaneously and at the same place?

Re:All together?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Given the choice, I'd rather be spied on by a government that has no power over me than by the government-friendly US based companies.

It's sad that threat modeling has to be done with something as mundane as AV software, but it's rather true. If you're someone with unpopular opinions, the last thing you want is your own government seeing what you're up to. If you're doing R&D work that some cheap third world country is going to copy and sell here thanks to crappy treasonous trade deals then it's best to not be spied on by foreigners because industrial espionage is a very real thing.

BTW, industrial espionage is also a reason to avoid "cloud computing" at all costs for any data you actually care about, especially business plans and product research, unless it's encrypted with a key only you control and that key has never seen a Windows 10 machine.

Re:All together?

[Ol Olsoc]

Some security companies are being told to only provide U.S. products

Given the choice between Kaspersky and the FSB vs Symantec Endpoint Security, I'd feel better protected by Kaspersky + FSB.

True, I was really pissed when Arris and Symantec activated SEP without my permission, and wouldn't allow me access to the internet unless I clicked to allow them access to the kingdom.

Took a few phone calls to both to clear that up.

But protection isn't the issue here with Kaspersky.

So what we have is the idea that Kaspersky is great, and all of the concerns about it are lies. That Israel is lying, the USA is lying, that the owner who is/was KGB and other executives who are FSB at Kaspersky are an exception to the rule that once you are in that world, you never leave that world, and that when you give a program where you give the providers of the program the keys to the kingdom, that given the background of th eactors, that they won't exploit what you gave them permission to exploit? https://www.extremetech.com/in...

It all boils down to a matter of trust. I take it that you trust the Russians and the FSB/KGB much more than you trust anyone in the USA? I surely don't, and the concerns about Kaspersky have been around a lot longer than Hillary's emails.

Re:All together?

[MightyMartian]

For Chriissakes the ACs are Russians

Re:All together?

[MightyMartian]

It just astonishes me how many places these Russian troll farms end up. I've been on some pretty obscure forums of late, and when the topic of Russia comes up, all of a sudden you have these streams of messages about how bad the US is, or how Russia isn't a threat to anyone. I think back over the last five or six years about all the posters I just sort of disregarded at the time as being nutty conspiracy theorists ranting on about the evils of the US government, and now I wonder if at least some portion of those posters really are just Russian trolls. They've pulled off some pretty interesting, if odd stunts, like duping Texan secessionists.

unintended consequence

[goose-incarnated]

Unintended consequences of the "wrong" candidate winning. The media's bitterness is not because the wrong candidate won, but because they were shown via the election results that they had less power than they thought they did.

Re:unintended consequence

[Antiocheian]

Yes, and thankfully their FUD doesn't work anymore.

Kaspersky is popular because it wins at independent tests run by experts. The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and their parrots should either hire some real security experts, people who can understand low level code, or simply keep being laughable.

If they believe that Kaspersky is trying to access sensitive information and send anything related to it through the Internet, they should prove it through its function, not because a spy told you so. Such as Kaspersky dealing with Stuxnet on a technical level instead of silly stories about espionage.

Re:unintended consequence

[CrashNBrn]

The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch is an unofficial branch of the Democratic Party?

Riiiight. The drugs are good over here.

Sure is gunna be unfortunate

[Anonymous Coward]

When it turns out that US AV companies do exaaactly the same shit, because all AV vendors do it.

At least Kaspersky actually made decent detection products.

Enjoy the farce that is Norton & McAfee

Re:Sure is gunna be unfortunate

[DrXym]

Maybe US AV companies do what you say. But that "you too" argument doesn't negate Kaspersky's actions or that people should leave this potential attack vector running on their computer.

Re:How to make any antivirus software safer?

[klingens]

You simply can not. Not Possible.

AV software needs to have full kernel level access to be able to protect you. As soon as you make a "safe space" for yourself, it's another place where malware can and will hide. Either you give full access to the hardware, not just the OS, or there is no way to actually protect the system. That's what makes things like the Intel management engine which has full control of your hardware, but no oversight by the OS or the user is so dangerous. It's why the NSA made intel to implement switches so they can disable Intel ME on NSA computers.

AV software need to phone home: to get virus definition updates and nowadays more importantly react fast to new networked threats by uploading possibly dangerous files. They have honeypots which do this all over the internet for years of course. However crowdsourcing new threats is much much more effective, since the really dangerous Malware, e.g. Stuxnet which was found by kaspersky, is targeted, not just spammed anymore.
The actually new and "best" high end products from Silicon Valley make the uploading of files from customers their main selling point: they claim only this way they can protect their enterprise clients. Kaspersky comparatively is low end consumer AV for the unwashed masses. The most expensive products like carbon black simply don't work if you're not uploading all your private files to a US company which is in deep with the US government agencies. All of the other AV companies in the US are too: google Project CAMBERDADA which shows what AV companies need to be attacked to subvert by the NSA. All the US/UK AV companies are suspiciously absent since they don't need to be reverse engineered: like any other US/UK based company they are working hand in hand with the intelligence services.

As a normal user in the West, I far more fear my own government's agencies, be it FBI, CIA, NSA, GCHQ, DGSE, BND, whatever, than a foreign agency far away: the domestic agency can actually directly harm me, fine me, incarcerate me, etc. than some agency in a country on another continent. And they have actually far more reason to do all that to me.

The end result:
AV software is a fundamentally flawed product due to all of this and simply shouldn't be used on any computer where you want to have a marginal expectation of privacy since you cannot protect yourself and use such a software.

Now spying is a concern

[evanh]

all of a sudden. What happened to "I've got nothing to hide."?

Is Kaspersky Software on Voting machines?

[Anonymous Coward]

Given Putin kills, imprisons, arrests people and businesses who oppose him, and given Russia's cyber attacks on the USA, you have to consider that Kaspersky may not have a choice in the matter. With so many KGB people involved there, it's probably better to be safe than sorry here and remove their software. There is actual evidence (see link below citing an Israeli hack into Kaspersky).

I wonder how many of those voting machines in the USA have Kaspersky anti virus installed on them, how many computers dealing with election rolls, and absentee ballots and vote counting. Can you really risk Russian software on voting systems when you know Russia has attacked the elections?

https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/oct/11/israel-hack-uncovered-russian-spies-use-kaspersky-lab-2015-report-us-software-federal-government

"While the Israeli spies were inside Kaspersky’s systems, they observed Russian spies in turn using the company’s tools to spy on American spies, the New York Times reports. That information, handed to the US, led to the decision in September to end the use of the company’s software across the federal government by December."

"But it still leaves many further questions unanswered. Crucially for Kaspersky, the Israeli hack apparently failed to provide enough information to determine whether it was a willing, or even knowing, participant in the Russian espionage."

"The Russian government exercises tight control over domestic and foreign high-tech industries operating within its borders. In June 2017, it began demanding the source code for certain software imported, ostensibly to search for “backdoors” inserted by foreign intelligence agencies. In practice, it’s widely believed that the Russian security agency scans the source code for undisclosed vulnerabilities it can use to improve its own hacking prowess."

Re:Is Kaspersky Software on Voting machines?

[Boutzev]

This is ridiculous. The whole world uses US software that provides full access to US three letter agencies, but now it is a big issue that Kaspersky happens to be a Russian company.

The only proof I have seen is talk about a security vulnerability discovered by Israeli intelligence in Kaspersky, which they reported to the US government. There is absolutely no proof of it being intentionally put there. Considering that Kaspersky does provide their source code to US based agencies, it is not very likely they would place anything intentionally and risking loosing their business. It doesn't make sense.

For common people in the US, it is probably safer to use Kaspersky rather than any US based software. Though it won't stop the three letter agencies from spying on you - they can do this through your OS, your smartphone, your TV set, through your ISP or your email provider ... Kaspersky won't help you much.

Re: Is Kaspersky Software on Voting machines?

[orlanz]

Why is this ridiculous?!? A country believes they discovered another country's (adversarial one) spy vector. And YOU think it's perfectly sane to not say or do anything about it?

Re:Is Kaspersky Software on Voting machines?

[phayes]

If you truly don't care about Russian aggression and think that the grass is so green over there then you would _emigrate_ to Russia. You'd discover that Russia's treatment of it's drug users, lies to it's population and use of your tax rubles are far far worse than the USAs.

But you wont do that because you prefer whining to acting on it and because deep down you know Russia is worse four it's citizens than the U.S for everyone who isn't in Putin's list of favorites.

Titling

[cloud.pt]

"Dodging Russian Spies..." not only sounds like "Dodgy Russian Spies", but it also presents a reason before an actual fact on a news/article/post header. This is a perfect example of psychologically loaded news, more even so than clickbait but it actually also is clickbait as they go for the "cold-warish" juicy part of the topic first.

Now seriously, stop doing titles like this, and don't enable them by allowing such stuff verbatim on slashdot from the original biased, flawed source.

Re:How to make any antivirus software safer?

[Tom]

Perhaps anti-virus wouldn't be even necessary if there were less users infected with anti-intelligence.

So tired of this bullshit argument.

I've been working in infosec for 20 years.

For about half of that time, I also said that "lusers" are the main problem.

Then one day I grew up and realized that they are just being humans and that's a bullshit excuse for not doing my job properly by complaining that water is wet and gravity sucks.
Guess what? We're paid good money for solving exactly these problems. If you can't bring a rocket to the moon because of gravity, you don't belong into rocket science. If you can't build a ship that floats because water is so difficult to work with, you don't belong into shipbuilding. And if you can't deal with people being people, you don't fucking belong into information security.

Re:How to make any antivirus software safer?

[Tom]

AV software is a fundamentally flawed product

Actually, it's our OS fundamentals that are flawed. In a properly designed system, the AV would not need full access to everything. Of course I'm talking 1970s "properly designed" here, not 2000s "ship half-ready to customer, then patch" philosophy. Sorry, I think they re-branded it "Agile Development".

AV is a workaround, a hack, for serious weaknesses in our fundamental systems design. That your e-mail system can access business secret documents when you open the wrong mail - that is the actual problem that needs solving. We have AV for the same reason we have condoms - there's a lot of STDs and for most of them we don't have good vaccinations.

In that sense, AV is not fundamentally flawed, because in a fundamentally non-flawed world, we wouldn't even have it. It's an at-least-this-works-most-of-the-time solution because we can't be arsed to tackle the real issues.

Citations [Re: All together?

[XXongo]

Citation needed.

http://time.com/4783932/inside-russia-social-media-war-america/
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/07/us/politics/russia-facebook-twitter-election.html
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/trump-putin-and-the-new-cold-war
https://www.newsmax.com/Politics/james-clapper-absolutely-russia-interfered/2017/05/30/id/793102/
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/448931/vladimir-putin-russian-election-interference-american-incompetence-weakness-helped-it

I'd lay off the magic mushrooms.

Yeah, I know-- don't bother saying it: you're not going to read any of these because "that's all fake news because the mainstream media lies". Yeah. When you dismiss everything that confronts your entrenched position, yes of course you will never change your mind.

Don't be deliberately stupid

[XXongo]

Using software from your main adversary is profoundly bad security. The same is true when Russia uses US software.

Antivirus software is second only to the operating system in terms of privilege and therefore makes an ideal attack vector. I bet most AV software is more than capable of maliciously stealing files, keystrokes, or planting a trojan if they were so directed.

I don't consider Russia an adversary;

Then you are stupid.

I don't mind people being stupid-- people are stupid sometimes; it happens. I do mind people being deliberately stupid because being stupid is the only way that they can defend their ideology.

If your idiotic ideology telling you "Washington is our enemy" and that means Russia is fine, you might consider changing your ideology to one that allows you to actually see the real world.