Investigation into the internal power struggle at Kaspersky Lab, which former staff say was won by managers with ties to Russian intelligence
Kaspersky Lab is under fire in the US over concerns that it could provide its clients' private — and at times secret — information to the Russian government. Tweets: @yashalevine Tweets: Yasha Levine / @yashalevine : Great article. I'd add that this “fight” for the soul of Kaspersky might not really be a fight. Take a look at America's cyber security industry. It functions as a privatized arm of the U.S. National Security State. Why should Russia's be any different? http://www.buzzfeed.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
The suspicion trail on Kaspersky Lab has been building for years: a 2016 New York Times profile framed Eugene Kaspersky as permanently occupied with allaying Kremlin-influence suspicions, and July 2017 reporting on company emails describing products made for Russian intelligence directly contradicted his 'total BS' denials.
This BuzzFeed investigation adds internal testimony to that record — former staff saying managers aligned with Russian intelligence won a power struggle inside the company — arriving months after reports that hackers likely used Kaspersky software to steal NSA data from a contractor's laptop, and that its US business was already shrinking.
First-order effects
- Kaspersky's US commercial position deteriorates further: a subsidiary had already been closed for over two months amid spying accusations, and staff-level corroboration of intelligence ties gives wavering corporate and government buyers a concrete reason to finish ripping the software out.
- Eugene Kaspersky's public defense collapses under the weight of his own former employees' accounts, shifting the story from unproven external allegation to internally sourced reporting.
Second-order effects
- Western rivals in endpoint security gain a durable trust advantage they did not have to earn technically, as procurement shifts from price and detection quality to vendor nationality — a dynamic that culminates years later in the White House weighing sanctions while split over enforcement against Kaspersky's large clientele.
- Russian retaliation risk rises: the same coverage notes officials feared sanctions could spur Russian cyberattacks, meaning any government action against Kaspersky doubles as escalation in the cyber conflict.
Third-order effects
- The global antivirus market structurally fragments along geopolitical lines, with security software — which sees everything on a machine — treated as an instrument of whichever state's intelligence services are closest to the vendor.
- Yasha Levine's framing points at the uncomfortable symmetry: if the US cybersecurity industry already functions as a privatized arm of the national security state, then mutual distrust between national security industries becomes the permanent operating condition, not a Kaspersky-specific scandal.
The trend: Security software vendors are being sorted by state alignment rather than product merit, as governments treat any firm with access to sensitive systems as a potential intelligence channel.