The rapidly developing story about Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab’s involvement in helping Russian government hackers steal sensitive National Security Agency equipment has taken another turn, as Wall Street Journal Report that help can only come with company knowledge.
Thursday’s report, citing unnamed current and former US officials, said the help came in the form of changes made to the Kaspersky antivirus software used by more than 400 million people worldwide. Typically, programs scan computer files for malware. “But in a modification to its regular operations that officials say can only be done with company knowledge, the program seeks broad terms such as “top secret,” which can be written on government documents. divided, and divided. Code names of US government programs, these people said. “
The report is the latest to detail a 2015 incident in which an NSA employee — described as a contractor by WSJ and an employee has documents from The Washington Post-classification applications that are removed from the agency and onto a computer connected to the Internet that has Kaspersky AV installed on it. Them WSJ, WaPowe had The New York Times All have reported that hackers working for the Russian government were able to access documents with the help of Kaspersky software.
On Tuesday, the NYT first reported that NSA officials first learned of the assistance provided by Kaspersky AV from Israeli intelligence officers who hacked into Kaspersky’s corporate network and saw the assistance in real time.
Wednesday’s report is the first to publicly state that the assistance was not the result of hacking or exploiting an unexpected weakness but rather was likely done with the knowledge of at least one Kaspersky official.
“There is no way, based on what the software is doing, that Kaspersky could not know about this,” WSJ said a former US ambassador with knowledge of the 2015 incident. The official went on to explain that the Kaspersky software is designed in such a way that it will have to be programmed to search for specific keywords. Kaspersky employees, the official continued, “likely” would have known such a thing was happening. The evidence, Wednesday’s report said, has led many US officials to believe that the company is a “witting accomplice” in finding applications on home computers.
In a statement released Wednesday, Kaspersky officials wrote:
Kaspersky Lab is not involved in and does not have any knowledge of the situation in question, and the company also pledges to work with US authorities to address any concerns they may have about its products and services. your system.
The company has maintained for a long time that it does not have inappropriate connections to any government, including that of Russia, and is strongly protected against all malware threats.
Meanwhile, Reuters reported that it was German officials there is no evidence to back up reports Kaspersky AV played a role in hacking NSA applications and does not intend to warn against using the software. Last month, the US Department of Homeland Security took the unprecedented step of banning all federal agencies and departments from using any Kaspersky products or services.
Them WSJ continues to report that US intelligence agencies spent months training and testing Kaspersky software to see if they could trigger it to behave as if it had discovered classified materials on computers monitored by US spies. “Those experiments convinced officials that Kaspersky was being used to detect classified information,” Wednesday’s report said.
Image listing by Mikhail Deynekin