Russia’s Kaspersky Lab denies reports on fooling competitors

MOSCOW, Aug 17 (PRIME) -- Russia’s Kaspersky Lab, an anti-virus software producer, has called claims of its former employees that it had deceived competitors a lie, a spokesperson for the company said late on August 14.

“Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any campaigns to mislead competitors and force their solutions to make incorrect positive operations. Such activities are unethical, dishonest, and their legitimacy is doubtful,” the spokesperson said.

Reuters reported earlier on August 14, quoting two former Kaspersky employees, that the company has been trying to hurt its rivals by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files for more than a decade.

The sources said the secret campaign targeted Microsoft, AVG Technologies, Avast Software and other rivals, fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers’ personal computers, Reuters said.

“Anonymous claims of irritated former employees about the fact that Kaspersky Lab or its general director (Yevgeny Kaspersky) were involved in such incidents are not only ungrounded, but just simply a lie,” the anti-virus maker’s spokesperson said.

In 2010 Kaspersky Lab held experiments to attract attention to the unreliability of detecting.

“Under the experiment, we uploaded 20 non-malicious ‘clean’ files to multi-scanner VirusTotal, which could not lead to faulty operations since the files were absolutely harmless. After the experiment, we discussed the problem with industry representatives and agreed on the matter. All samples were handed over to journalists for independent tests,” a company source said.

In 2012, VirusTotal was infected with malicious files, which resulted in a series of faulty operations, and Kaspersky Lab was among the victims.

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