Category Archives: Kaspersky Lab

Kaspersky freezes partnership with Europol after EU calls for company ban

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Kaspersky Lab pulled out of a partnership with Europol on Wednesday after the European Parliament passed a resolution characterizing Kaspersky “confirmed as malicious” and calling for a company ban. The measure passed 476 to 151. We have protected the EU for 20 years working with law enforcement leading to multiple arrests of CYBERCRIMINALS. Based upon today’s decision from the EU Parliament, we are forced to freeze our cooperation with orgs including @Europol & #NoMoreRansom pic.twitter.com/7dSGn9Bycw — Eugene Kaspersky (@e_kaspersky) June 13, 2018 The “European Parliament decision welcomes cybercrime,” Kaspersky founder Eugene Kaspersky tweeted on Wednesday. The company has worked with Europol for years on cybercrime investigations. Kaspersky also has a notable partnership with Interpol, where the company has supplied threat intelligence, hardware, software, digital forensics and other operations. Kaspersky also pulled out of the No More Ransom project, a partnership between public and private organizations to detect and prevent the spread […]

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Krebs: NPPD must use threat intel better

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The agency inside the Department of Homeland Security charged with protecting critical infrastructure needs to get better at assessing cyber risk rather than chasing threats, according to a top DHS official. “We have a threat intelligence problem…because we obsess about the threat,” Christopher Krebs said Wednesday at the Cybersecurity Leadership Forum presented by Forcepoint and produced by CyberScoop and FedScoop. “We’re running this way and that way, hunting down every little piece of threat intelligence and reacting without a lot of context.” As an example, Krebs pointed to the Illinois voter registration system that Russian hackers breached ahead of the 2016 presidential election.Even if the hackers had been able to delete voter files, Krebs said, voters would still have been able to cast their ballots by having their registration verified through other records, meaning the risk was manageable. Putting the risk, or lack thereof, of cyberthreats into context is a big task […]

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Top U.S. counterintelligence official: Kaspersky’s move to Switzerland doesn’t matter

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The ongoing fight between the U.S. government and Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab led the company to begin moving “a good part” of its infrastructure to Switzerland in a highly-visible move toward transparency in the face of spying accusations. The U.S.’s top counterintelligence official, however, says Kaspersky’s move to Switzerland makes no difference to him. William Evanina, the Director of the National Counterintelligence and Security Center, looks at the way the U.S. government handles Kaspersky — which is now banned from the U.S. federal government and is losing ground in the private sector — as “an opportunity to create a model,” he said. “This will not be the last time this happens. I think there will be more to come along, I call them ‘nation-state threats that emanate through the global business process.’ ” Kaspersky’s opening of a “Transparency Center” in Switzerland is significant but leaves open a wide range of questions. The company has […]

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Judge dismisses Kaspersky lawsuits, U.S. government ban will stand

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Two lawsuits filed by the Russian cybersecurity firm Kaspersky Lab were dismissed Wednesday, ending the Moscow-based company’s attempt to lift the U.S. government’s ban on its products. Kaspersky filed the lawsuits after its products were banned from U.S. government systems in both a Binding Operational Directive from the Department of Homeland Security and the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act. That ban goes into effect on Oct. 1, 2o18. “The NDAA does not inflict ‘punishment’ on Kaspersky Lab,” Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia, wrote in her opinion. “It eliminates a perceived risk to the nation’s cybersecurity and, in so doing, has the secondary effect of foreclosing one small source of revenue for a large multinational corporation.” The basis of Kaspersky’s lawsuit was that the bans were unconstitutional and caused undue harm to the company. The ban is constitutional, the judge concluded. “These defensive actions may very well have […]

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Who’s Afraid of Kaspersky?

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We went to Kaspersky Lab’s SAS conference, where the controversial Russian anti-virus firm showcases its best research, wines and dines competitors and journalists, and burns American espionage operations. Continue reading Who’s Afraid of Kaspersky?→

Dutch ditch Kaspersky on fears of Russian government influence

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The Dutch government announced Monday that it will end use of Kaspersky Lab’s anti-virus software, citing the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm’s alleged ties to the Russian government.  The Russian government has an “offensive cyber program that targets among others the Netherlands and Dutch interests,” wrote Justice Minister Ferdinand Grapperhaus in a letter to parliament that outlined the decision.  Grapperhaus explained that because Kaspersky Lab is headquartered in Moscow, it is subject to Russian laws and the could be forced to comply with state interests.  Cybersecurity experts and U.S. intelligence officials have previously said the same, fearing that Russian intelligence could use the company’s anti-virus program as a platform for targeted espionage.  All U.S. federal agencies were ordered by the Department of Homeland Security to stop using Kaspersky products in December 2017. That same month, the United Kingdom’s National Cyber Security Centre warned government agencies to avoid Russian anti-virus software.  In April, […]

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Possible Kaspersky sanctions meet resistance inside U.S. government

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A White House plan to sanction Kaspersky Lab has met resistance from senior U.S. government officials who are worried that it could set a dangerous precedent for global behavior on the internet, according to two officials familiar with the matter. The plan to sanction the Moscow-based anti-virus maker has largely been pioneered by the National Security Council, CyberScoop previously reported. A source with knowledge of the effort recently said that Treasury Department head Steve Mnuchin has “OK’d” sanctions against Kaspersky, although several of his advisers are against it. A plan to make the sanctions official has no immediate timetable. The final decision rests with the executive branch; which is home to the NSC. When reached for comment, a spokesperson for the Treasury Department said the agency “does not telegraph sanctions or comment on prospective actions.” The NSC previously declined to comment on possible Kaspersky sanctions. Some in government worry about the impact such sanctions […]

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Russian hackers found the ‘ultimate’ hacking tool buried in the supply chain of laptops

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When Vitaly Kamluk, a security researcher with Kaspersky Lab, discovered a mysterious program named “Computrace” deeply burrowed into his colleagues’ computers, he expected to find an elite hacking group at the other end — something the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm is keenly familiar with. Instead, Kamluk had uncovered a flawed but legitimate tracking software program developed by a Canadian company, named Absolute Software, which had been apparently installed at the manufacturer level. Computrace — now known as LoJack For Laptops via a licensing agreement with the famous vehicle-tracking company — has been publicly documented as having security problems, based on multiple reports, which worried Kamluk because he knew someone could leverage the underlying program in an attack to gain remote access. “It was very alarming to find unauthorized instances of Computrace,” Kamluk told CyberScoop. “There was no explanation how those new private computers had Computrace activated … We contacted Absolute technical support and provided hardware serial numbers, as […]

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Variant of SynAck Malware Adopts Doppelgänging Technique

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Ransomware adopts Process Doppelgänging technique to avoid antivirus researchers and avoid detection in a newly identified malware double threat targeting users in the U.S., Kuwait and Germany. Continue reading Variant of SynAck Malware Adopts Doppelgänging Technique→

U.S. government weighing sanctions against Kaspersky Lab

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The U.S. government is considering sanctions against Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab as part of a wider round of action carried out against the Russian government, according to U.S. intelligence officials familiar with the matter. The sanctions would be a considerable expansion and escalation of the U.S. government’s actions against the company. Kaspersky, which has two ongoing lawsuits against the U.S. government, has been called “an unacceptable threat to national security” by numerous U.S. officials and lawmakers. Officials told CyberScoop any additional action against Kaspersky would occur at the lawsuits’ conclusion, which Kaspersky filed in response to a stipulation in the 2018 National Defense Authorization Act that bans its products from federal government networks. If the sanctions came to fruition, the company would be barred from operating in the U.S. and potentially even U.S. allies. Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, D-N.H., authored legislation to ban Kaspersky, which was eventually introduced into the NDAA. In […]

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