According to Reuters, two former employees of Kaspersky Lab have accused the company of spreading malware in order to trick its competition into flagging important files on their customers’ PCs, and classifying them as malicious. The employees said in a statement that Microsoft, AVG Technologies, Avast Software and other rivals were targeted in the campaign.
Kaspersky Lab has denied the accusations and responded to Reuters by saying:
Our company has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable.
The CEO of Kaspersky Lab has also hit back at the accusations in a blog post.
Disgruntled ex-employees often say nasty things about their former employers, but in this case, the lies are just ludicrous. Maybe these sources managed to impress the journalist, but in my view publishing such an ‘exclusive’ – WITHOUT A SHRED OF EVIDENCE – is not what I understand to be good journalism.
Kaspersky Lab is one of the most popular antivirus software makers with over 400 million users globally.
Source:Reuters
