Former employees of Kaspersky Labs have tipped off the media to an alleged practice of faking malware. It is claimed the company used fake malware to get rival anti-virus companies to flag the programs as malicious, potentially tarnishing their reputations with numerous fake positives.

For obvious reasons, the tip-offs have come from anonymous individuals who claim to have worked for Kaspersky Labs, yet their identities naturally cannot be verified. They could in fact be employees of rival anti-virus companies. It is therefore difficult to determine whether there is any truth in the allegations. Kaspersky Labs denied the allegations, in fact Eugene Kaspersky has been quite vocal on social media and has spoken out on Twitter, vehemently denying the accusations.

In an effort to find out more, we contacted Kaspersky Labs to find out further details. We received a reply as follows:

Kaspersky Denies Fake Malware Claims

“Contrary to allegations made in a Reuters news story, Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing. Such actions are unethical, dishonest and illegal.” Kaspersky went on to say, “Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false. As a member of the security community, we share our threat intelligence data and IOCs on advanced threat actors with other vendors, and we also receive and analyze threat data provided by others. Although the security market is very competitive, trusted threat data exchange is a critical part of the overall security of the entire IT ecosystem, and we fight hard to help ensure that this exchange is not compromised or corrupted.”

Interestingly though, there does appear to be a grain of truth in the accusations, with the anti-virus software giant confirming that harmless malware was in fact created and uploaded. However, this was part of a test of its own software systems, not an attempt to discredit rivals. The statement issued explained the experiment:

“In 2010, we conducted a one-time experiment uploading only 20 samples of non-malicious files to the VirusTotal multi-scanner, which would not cause false positives as these files were absolutely clean, useless and harmless. After the experiment, we made it public and provided all the samples used to the media so they could test it for themselves. We conducted the experiment to draw the security community’s attention to the problem of insufficiency of multi-scanner based detection when files are blocked only because other vendors detected them as being malicious, without actual examination of the file activity (behavior).” The story was reported at the time in the media.

Kaspersky also explained that “After that experiment, we had a discussion with the antivirus industry regarding this issue and understood we were in agreement on all major points.” Further information on cascading false positives can be found here.

In 2012, Kaspersky Labs was among the affected companies impacted by an unknown source uploading bad files to VirusTotal, which led to a number of incidents with false-positive detections. To resolve this issue, in October 2013, during the VB Conference in Berlin, there was a private meeting between leading antivirus vendors to exchange the information about the incidents, work out the motives behind this attack and develop an action plan. It is still unclear who was behind this campaign.”

False positives are common in the internet security industry. What is not known, and probably never will be, is who creates the bad samples that lead to false positives. As Ronan Kavanagh, CEO at TitanHQ, points out,“Kaspersky is an excellent product, we have never had an issue with it, quite the opposite in fact. Of course we have seen false positives, we were targeted by bad samples as were many other security vendors but we would have no visibility on who carried out these attacks.  The critical thing is that as an industry we work together in fighting back”.

Have you discovered false positives when you have run your software security programs?