Eugene Kaspersky, chairman and CEO of Kaspersky Lab, listens to a question during an interview in New York March 10, 2015. REUTERS
A tech intrigue story from Joe Menn at Reuters on alleged dirty-doings between the software security firm Kaspersky and its rivals.
In 2009, Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of one of the world’s top security companies, told some of his lieutenants that they should attack rival antivirus software maker AVG Technologies N.V. (AVG.N) by “rubbing them out in the outhouse,” one of several previously undisclosed emails shows.
He was quoting from Vladimir Putin’s famous threat a decade earlier to pursue Chechen rebels wherever they were: “If we catch them in the toilet, then we will rub them out in the outhouse.”
Former employees say that the reprisal Kaspersky was pushing for was to trick AVG’s antivirus software into producing false positives – that is, misclassifying clean computer files as infected. As previously reported by Reuters, the plan involved creating fake virus samples and malware identifications to fool competitors into disabling or deleting important files, thereby creating problems for their customers.
“Exclusive: Russia’s Kaspersky threatened to ‘rub out’ rival, email shows” [reuters]