kaspersky databases are extremely out of date

Sharov said the testing lab came back very quickly with an answer: Seven antivirus products detected the clean files as malicious. Could you please check what your system says about that?'” “We went to the testing laboratories and said, ‘We are sending you clean files, but a little bit modified. “We did the same kind of thing,” Sharov said. In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Sharov said Dr.Web conducted similar analyses and reached similar conclusions, although he said the company never mislabeled samples submitted to testing labs. “When Kaspersky’s complaints did not lead to significant change, the former employees said, it stepped up the sabotage.”Įugene Kaspersky posted a lengthy denial of the story on his personal blog, calling the story a “conflation of a number of facts with a generous amount of pure fiction.” But according to Dr.Web CEO Boris Sharov, Kaspersky was not alone in probing which antivirus firms were merely aping the technology of competitors instead of developing their own.

“Within a week and a half, all 10 files were declared dangerous by as many as 14 security companies that had blindly followed Kaspersky’s lead, according to a media presentation given by senior Kaspersky analyst Magnus Kalkuhl in Moscow in January 2010,” wrote Reuters’ Joe Menn. The story said the campaign targeted antivirus products sold or given away by AVG, Avast and Microsoft. Reuters cited an experiment that Kaspersky first publicized in 2010, in which a German computer magazine created ten harmless files and told antivirus scanning service that Kaspersky detected them as malicious (Virustotal aggregates data on suspicious files and shares them with security companies).

Such errors, known in the industry as “false positives,” can be quite costly, disruptive and embarrassing for antivirus vendors and their customers. The Reuters piece cited anonymous, former Kaspersky employees who said the company assigned staff to reverse-engineer competitors’ virus detection software to figure out how to fool those products into flagging good files as malicious. But according to interviews with the CEO of Dr.Web - Kaspersky’s main competitor in Russia - both companies experimented with ways to expose antivirus vendors who blindly accepted malware intelligence shared by rival firms. A recent Reuters story accusing Russian security firm Kaspersky Lab of faking malware to harm rivals prompted denials from the company’s eponymous chief executive - Eugene Kaspersky - who called the story “complete BS” and noted that his firm was a victim of such activity.

Kaspersky databases are extremely out of date