

“To me, at this point, Kaspersky’s continued support of the Russian defense ministry has demonstrated that they’ve made a choice to help the bad guys. “The notion that all of Kaspersky’s defenses and arguments in the past must now be looked through the current unlawful military operations in Ukraine puts all of this into stark relief,” Tom Bossert, former homeland security advisor for President Trump, told CyberScoop. Now, a new wave of potential actions aimed at Kaspersky as an additional means of punishing Moscow over the war adds even more pressure on the already beleaguered company. In March, after Eugene Kaspersky tweeted that he hoped Ukrainians and Russians could “compromise,” as the Russians were bombing civilian targets, and many security researchers questioned why the company was protecting Russian military web assets from DDoS attacks, industry and government leaders worldwide again questioned whether it could be trusted.

Indeed, the company founded in 1989 has hundreds of millions of users worldwide and a track record of producing some of the most important cybersecurity research over the past three decades, often exposing Russian cyber operations against American interests.īut the Ukraine war has given Kaspersky critics even more ammunition. Its founder, Eugene Kaspersky, regularly denied his antivirus company was doing the bidding of the Russian government. and Britain and mounting suspicions of links to Russian intelligence services, Moscow’s most famous cybersecurity company, Kaspersky, managed to persevere. Despite suffering years of government bans in the U.S.
