Kaspersky CEO: False positives affected us too, Reuters report does not contain ‘a shred of evidence’
Reuters published a story today claiming security firm Kaspersky Lab tried to damage rivals (including Microsoft, AVG, and Avast) by tricking their antivirus software programs …
Context & Ripple Effects
This denial lands one day after Reuters published ex-employees' claims that Kaspersky Lab deliberately triggered false positives in rival antivirus products from Microsoft, AVG, and Avast to delete or disable their files. CEO Eugene Kaspersky's counter — that his own products suffered false positives too and the report lacks 'a shred of evidence' — turns the dispute into a credibility contest between anonymous former staff and the company itself.
The episode sits inside a longer arc the corpus traces clearly: Kaspersky has spent years managing suspicion over Kremlin influence, as captured in the New York Times' profile of its founder, and the trust question refuses to close — two years later, Bloomberg reported company emails indicating products made for Russian intelligence. Each allegation forces another public defense from a firm whose entire product is trust.
First-order effects
- Microsoft, AVG, and Avast are now publicly named as alleged sabotage targets, putting pressure on all three to respond or investigate their own telemetry rather than leave the accusation hanging.
- Kaspersky must defend on two fronts at once — the specific false-positive claim and its standing denials of Kremlin ties — with no independent verification available for either side.
Second-order effects
- Enterprise and government buyers of antivirus software gain a new due-diligence question — who verifies what a vendor's engine flags and deletes — pushing procurement toward vendors with auditable detection pipelines.
- Competing Western security firms have an opening to differentiate on transparency and provenance, converting a rival's reputational crisis into sales positioning without making accusations themselves.
Third-order effects
- If insider-sourced allegations keep arriving faster than any body can verify them, security vendor selection will shift structurally toward jurisdiction and governance signals — ownership, data handling, disclosure practices — rather than detection benchmarks alone.
- The unresolved pattern here foreshadows the harder reckoning that followed: once allegations graduate from ex-employees to documented intelligence cooperation, as later reporting suggests, national governments rather than customers become the arbiters of which AV vendors survive in their markets.
The trend: Trust in global security software is shifting from technical efficacy toward verifiable corporate provenance, with geopolitical suspicion acting as a persistent tax on vendors caught between markets.