US: Israel Hacked Kaspersky; Discovered Russia was using the program to hack US computers, informed the Pentagon.

(Washington) In Sept the Trump administration ordered the removal of all Kaspersky security products from US government IT systems, citing claims that the company is vulnerable to influence from the Russian government.  The company went public denying the allegations, this followed rumours from July that Kaspersky was working with Russian intelligence agencies. Well its just got a lot worse for the computer software company with the news that the Israelis actually hacked into the company 2 years ago and in real time caught Kremlin-backed hackers searching computers around the world for the code names of American intelligence programs using Kaspersky improvised search tool.

This may help explain as to how the growth of worldwide Russian hacking, was all down to the use of Kaspersky’s antivirus software by over 400 million people worldwide, including by officials at some two dozen American government agencies.  As Anti-virus programs have full access to all your files, it isn’t hard to see how somebody would use any AV program as a sort of google in which to access anything and everything that you have hidden away.

Over the past few years Kaspersky had come under scrutiny by the cybersecurity industry for a couple of reasons:

1)     They use an industry technique called ‘silent signatures’, strings of code that operate behind the scenes to detect malware, but can easily be rewritten to search computers for other data. It’s a standard industry technique, one that wouldn't be so worrying on its own if not for the next detail.

2)     Kaspersky is also the only major antivirus company that routes its data through Russian Internet service providers and service providers, by local law, are subject to Russian surveillance. The company claims all the data provided to the government is encrypted, but experts aren't so sure if that makes the data unreadable by Russian intelligence agencies.

With the latest revelations made public, it seems that Kaspersky is going to have a few lean years in the West. If not around the world as other governments and people follow suit. If you are currently running a Kaspersky security program and require a little more information on the matter at hand, Tom's guide have knocked out a most informative package in which to help illuminate this ongoing story.