Ex-employees say Kaspersky tricked rivals' antivirus programs to mark false-positives, deleting or disabling important files
Exclusive: Russian antivirus firm faked malware to harm rivals - Ex-employees — Beginning more than a decade ago, one of the largest security companies in the world …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Reuters exclusive lands on an already-contentious beat: ex-employees allege Kaspersky spent more than a decade planting fake malware so rival antivirus engines would flag legitimate files for deletion or disablement. Within a day, CEO Eugene Kaspersky pushed back, arguing false positives had hurt his own products too and that the report contains 'not a shred of evidence'.
What makes the allegation consequential rather than tabloid is what follows it in the coverage arc: by 2017, sources describe the company's own antivirus tool being repurposed to search machines for terms like 'top secret', and Bloomberg reporting cites company emails tying Kaspersky Lab to work for Russian intelligence — claims the CEO has dismissed as 'total BS'. A firm whose product sits at the deepest layer of system trust is now fighting for its right to be trusted at all.
First-order effects
- Rival antivirus vendors whose products were allegedly tricked into deleting or disabling important files face immediate reputational damage — their detection engines, sold as protective, are cast as attack surfaces.
Second-order effects
- Kaspersky's denial frames the dispute as evidence vs. allegation, forcing competitors, customers, and press to weigh insider testimony against a CEO who says false positives cut both ways — a credibility contest that raises scrutiny of every major AV vendor's testing practices.
Third-order effects
- The pattern across this coverage — sabotage allegations, espionage claims about the tool itself, intelligence-work emails — points toward geopolitical trust becoming a purchasing criterion for security software, foreshadowing the kind of government bans and forced market exits Kaspersky later faced in its US wind-down.
The trend: Security software is being re-sorted along national-trust lines, where a vendor's deep system access means alleged ties to a state can end its access to entire markets.