by Charles Miller

In last week's column I teased that there was a backstory that might explain why the U.S. banned the use of Kaspersky Lab antivirus software on government computers six years ago in 2017. According to the gossip exchanged on some tech blog sites, the real reason for that ban is a bit on the embarrassing side.

Rumor has it that one of the shadowy three-letter clandestine agencies near Washington D.C. had a department hard at work creating nasty computer viruses and other malware that could be weaponized against adversaries of the U.S. Knowing that adversaries of the U.S. are doing the same thing and given the current political climate, this should surprise no one.

It is standard procedure that when any antivirus program detects something new or suspicious, the program automatically sends a sample off to the antivirus software company for analysis. Well, it seems that someone working for one of those super-secret three-letter agencies of the U.S. government forgot about that and the Kaspersky antivirus software on their computer sent off to Moscow samples of all the top-secret viruses and malware the agency had spent so much time and money developing. Of course if that is true then all that work was rendered worthless because Kaspersky supposedly then knew what the spy agencies were up to.

The concerns surrounding Kaspersky Lab are longstanding and predate this 2017 episode. The F.B.I. along with those three-letter spy agencies have been trying for years to determine whether Kaspersky’s senior executives are working with Russian military and intelligence. They have been investigating whether Kaspersky's well-regarded antivirus programs contain back doors that allow Russian intelligence access into the computers on which it is running. The company denies those allegations and no evidence to the contrary has ever been found.

That notwithstanding, earlier this year the Biden administration announced a total ban on sales and software updates for Kaspersky software in the United States citing potential national security risks. So now all of those users who depended on Kaspersky will no longer have any antivirus protection?

But not so fast… In a move that is both understandable and controversial, Kaspersky Labs took steps to ensure that its customers were protected. They probably did that with the best of intentions, but thoroughly mishandled the transition. Without warning the U.S. users of Kaspersky antivirus suddenly found a new antivirus program named UltraAV installed on their computers. If they tried to scan the new uninvited program with their trusted Kaspersky antivirus they discovered it was completely gone.

It is easy to interpret that Kaspersky’s motivation was that they did not want to leave their loyal customers unprotected. And there was an email notice, the kind nobody ever takes time to read, that included a lot of fine print in which it warned about the upcoming uninstall of Kaspersky and installation of UltraAV. It is also likely that Kaspersky was paid a nice bit of change for selling its customer list to UltraAV, and it is not clear if that included all those customer’s credit card information.

In any case, this is a perfect example of how to cause a public relations disaster even when done with the best interests of the consumer in mind.

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Charles Miller is a freelance computer consultant with decades of IT experience and a Texan with a lifetime love for Mexico. The opinions expressed are his own. He may be contacted at 415-101-8528 or email FAQ8 (at) SMAguru.com.

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