NSA malware on Kaspersky Network; Israeli Intelligence

Kaspersky is in the eye of a storm after reports claim that National Security Agency hacking tool was found in their network. Israeli intelligence which claims to have a hacked Kaspersky network has informed the US intelligence about this finding.

The claims are the latest in a string of stories leaked to US press, this time to the New York Times.

This is the latest ever since the United States hostile relationship with Moscow-based cyber security firm Kaspersky. It claims that “Israeli intelligence officers looked in real time as Russian government hackers searched computers around the world for the code names of American intelligence programs”.

The tool that was used to conduct the search was the Kaspersky’s own antivirus software, says Israeli intelligence. This development comes after the US government’s decision to remove Kaspersky security software from all government domains.

A report in the Wall Street Journal also confirmed this move by Kaspersky that the Russian software security indulged in the exfiltrating classified document from the computer of NSA employees.

Kaspersky was known to be the masters of ‘heuristic detection’ unlike now when at the age of high-speed internet majority of the antivirus software send suspicious files back to the base for analysis and evaluation and then claim champions. Kaspersky has never claimed such thing in the past. In a press release, they released this version.

“We absolutely and aggressively detect and clean malware infections no matter the source, and have been proudly doing so for 20 years,” wrote, co-founder Eugene Kaspersky in a blog post last week in the wake of allegations aired in the US press. “We make no apologies for being aggressive in the battle against malware and cyber criminals – you shouldn’t accept any less.

“While protecting our customers, we do – as any other cybersecurity vendors – check the health of a computer. It works like an X-ray: the security solution can see almost everything in order to identify problems, but it cannot attribute what it sees to a particular user.”

Kaspersky has been reiterating in every media that it has no connection with any government nor in the US nor Russia. Eugene Kaspersky has said for months the company he co-founded is caught in the middle of a geopolitical fight between Washington and Moscow. The company feigned ignorance about the Israeli hack but has assured that it will investigate.

There is still no publicly available evidence, technical or otherwise, that Kaspersky operates on behalf of Russian intelligence. The company continues to forcefully deny every charge of wrongdoing.