Here’s to aggressive detection of maliciousness!

In recent years there’s been all sorts written about us in the U.S. press, and the article last Thursday in the Wall Street Journal at first seemed to be just more of the same: the latest in a long line of conspiratorial smear-articles. Here’s why it seemed so: according to anonymous sources, a few years ago Russian government-backed hackers, allegedly, with the help of a hack into the product of Your Humble Servant, stole from the home computer of an NSA employee secret documentation. Btw: our formal response to this story is here.

However, if you strip the article of the content regarding alleged Kremlin-backed hackers, there emerges an outline to a very different – believable – possible scenario, one in which, as the article itself points out, we are ‘aggressive in [our] methods of fighting malware’.

Ok, let’s go over the article again…

In 2015 a certain NSA employee – a developer working on the U.S. cyber-espionage program – decided to work from home for a bit and so copied some secret documentation onto his (her?) home computer, probably via a USB stick. Now, on that home computer he’d – quite rightly and understandably – installed the best antivirus in the world, and – also quite rightly – had our cloud-based KSN activated. Thus the scene was set, and he continued his daily travails on state-backed malware in the comfort of his own home.

Let’s go over that just once more…

So, a spy-software developer was working at home on same spy-software, having all the instrumentation and documentation he needed for such a task, and protecting himself from the world’s computer maliciousness with our cloud-connected product.

Now, what could have happened next? This is what:

Malware could have been detected as suspicious by the AV and sent to the cloud for analysis. For this is the standard process for processing any newly-found malware – and by ‘standard’ I mean standard across the industry; all our competitors use a similar logic in this or that form. And experience shows it’s a very effective method for fighting cyberthreats (that’s why everyone uses it).

So what happens with the data that gets sent to the cloud? In ~99.99% of cases, analysis of the suspicious objects is done by our machine learning technologies, and if they’re malware, they’re added to our malware detection database (and also to our archive), and the rest goes in the bin. The other ~0.1% of data is sent for manual processing by our virus analysts, who analyze it and make their verdicts as to whether it’s malware or not.

Ok – I hope that part’s all clear.

Next: What about the possibility of hack into our products by Russian-government-backed hackers?

Theoretically such a hack is possible (program code is written by humans, and humans will make mistakes), but I put the probability of an actual hack at zero. Here’s one example as to why:

In the same year as what the WSJ describes occurred, we discovered on our own network an attack by an unknown seemingly state-sponsored actor – Duqu2. Consequently we conducted a painstakingly detailed audit of our source code, updates and other technologies, and found… – no signs whatsoever of any third-party breach of any of it. So as you can see, we take any reports about possible vulnerabilities in our products very seriously. And this new report about possible vulnerabilities is no exception, which is why we’ll be conducting another deep audit very soon.

The takeaway:

If the story about our product’s uncovering of government-grade malware on an NSA employee’s home computer is real, then that, ladies and gents, is something to be proud of. Proactively detecting previously unknown highly-sophisticated malware is a real achievement. And it’s the best proof there is of the excellence of our technologies, plus confirmation of our mission: to protect against any cyberthreat no matter where it may come from or its objective.

So, like I say… here’s to aggressive detection of malware. Cheers!

READ COMMENTS 3
Comments 3 Leave a note

    Emilio

    Like a boss Eugene.

    To begin with I’m so sick of all this BS. For Kaspersky to put the company at risk by conducting any type of illegal headline making moves would go against not only their SLA’s with clients but proof deadly for Eugene as a businessman i.e. profits.

    The US plays innocent and victimized but so many times in the past and to this current day have their dirty fingers in everyone’s business including their spoiled rich child Israel along for the ride. Whether that business be legitimate/Non-malevolent or Malevolent/illegal they still poke their tentacles into the middle of it.

    For the record I do not trust Russia. But I do trust Kaspersky until otherwise proven by clear logic driven evidence. Not just politically fueled spy vs spy McCarthyism conjecture rants and reports.

    The same case could be made for carbon black and Googles VirusTotal vacuuming up security sensitive; PII; classified and proprietary information with their pay to access service. Anyone submitting documents with beacon back code can plainly see random clients opening and viewing the documents from all over the globe. Both companies being based in the US get a pass card for simply being good old aMurican made software. If those two companies were Russian both their butts would be splattered across the headlines along with Kaspersky.

    Andy

    I am saddened by the U.S.’s media & gov’t’s behavior by accusing a company with no proof. They’ve done it to ZTE as well and now they’re using their investigations into their financials to dig up information on North Korea.

    https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-08/u-s-is-said-to-target-north-korea-violators-with-zte-s-help

    While I appreciate Kaspersky’s openness, I hope it isn’t abused. If the NSA can’t beat encryption apparently it’s easier to bully.

    I deployed KES in a company several years back and, of all of my years in technology, it was one of 2 vendors that a) supported me b) had a product which exceeded my expectations. The central management console was easy to grasp and the feature set was everything I had figured a security solution should provide. It’s sad but if they wanted to know how it works so well they could start building up the same feature set and see how well it does for them. Heuristics look for things that look funny. I can’t imagine Israel hackers actually hacked Kaspersky the company but saw random strings that sounded like the heuristic engine was looking for files that did funny things… which happened to be characteristics of some tools used by the NSA. That sounds like good heuristics to me.

    My working theory is that the U.S. gov’t wants to know how your product works and see how much they can glean on Russia’s gov’t tactics by attacking a Russian business.

    Maybe it’s faith but I would think there are many colleagues in the U.S. security sector that simply do not see Kaspersky as a company that would do things with bad intentions. For me your software and your transparency is certainly the most polished scam if it were true, which baffles me.

    Roy

    “…My working theory is that the U.S. gov’t wants to know how your product works and see how much they can glean on Russia’s gov’t tactics by attacking a Russian business…”

    Your thinking too hard. They just want to know how to defeat K AV.

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