Kaspersky Admits To Reaping Hacking Tools From NSA Employee PC (zdnet.com)

Kaspersky has acknowledged that code belonging to the US National Security Agency (NSA) was lifted from a PC for analysis but insists the theft was not intentional. From a report: In October, a report from the Wall Street Journal claimed that in 2015, the Russian firm targeted an employee of the NSA known for working on the intelligence agency's hacking tools and software. The story suggested that the unnamed employee took classified materials home and operated on their PC, which was running Kaspersky's antivirus software. Once these secretive files were identified -- through an avenue carved by the antivirus -- the Russian government was then able to obtain this information. Kaspersky has denied any wrongdoing, but the allegation that the firm was working covertly with the Russian government was enough to ensure Kaspersky products were banned on federal networks. There was a number of theories relating to what actually took place -- was Kaspersky deliberately targeting NSA employees on behalf of the Kremlin, did an external threat actor exploit a zero-day vulnerability in Kaspersky's antivirus, or were the files detected and pulled by accident? According to Kaspersky, the latter is true. On Wednesday, the Moscow-based firm said in a statement that the results of a preliminary investigation have produced a rough timeline of how the incident took place. It was actually a year earlier than the WSJ believed, in 2014, that code belonging to the NSA's Equation Group was taken.

Comments

Re:Beleivable

[mangastudent]

More generally a member of our Ruling Class. See for example John Deutch per Wikipedia:

Soon after Deutch's departure from the CIA [as Director] in 1996 it was revealed that classified materials had been kept on several of Deutch's laptop computers designated as unclassified. In January 1997, the CIA began a formal security investigation of the matter. Senior management members at the CIA declined to fully pursue the security breach. More than two years after his departure, the matter was referred to the Department of Justice, where Attorney General Janet Reno declined to prosecute. She did, however, recommend an investigation to determine whether Deutch should retain his security clearance. President Clinton issued a Presidential pardon on his last day in office.

Very specifically, according to local newspaper reports (I was living in the D.C. area at the time), he took materials out of a Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility, the sort of thing that you swear each time you enter one not to do, and did the above with one or more computers he used at home that were attached to the Internet, as I recall, even emailed stuff based on this Top Secret material.

More recently, many of Hillary's retinue did the same or worse, e.g. with raw NSA intercepts, and of course nothing happened to them.

Re: Data trail

[Solandri]

That's the problem with you conspiracy kooks. Occams razor tells us otherwise.

I see people making this mistake a lot. Occam's razor isn't a law. It doesn't "tell us" anything. It doesn't say "The simplest explanation is the correct one."

It actually goes: "The simplest explanation tends to be the correct one." Occam's razor merely suggests what is the most probable answer. It doesn't prove or tell us anything, it simply lets you organize hypotheses into, lacking any other evidence, the most likely order of plausibility. You still have to prove the most-likely hypothesis is correct. And a less-likely (more complicated) hypothesis can still turn out to be the correct one.