Still wanna use Kaspersky?

[GroundZero3]

Russia's Top Cyber Sleuth Foils US Spies, Helps Kremlin Pals | Danger Room | Wired.com

What is mentioned is Kaspersky’s vision for the future of Internet security—which by Western standards can seem extreme. It includes requiring strictly monitored digital passports for some online activities and enabling government regulation of social networks to thwart protest movements. “It’s too much freedom there,” Kaspersky says, referring to sites like Facebook. “Freedom is good. But the bad guys—they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion.”

[ShyguyXPC]

Damn, I thought the 1st page was too dang long to read, too much info, but its 6 pages long

[SoloCamo]

At work, will read when I get home.

Don't use it anyways, I prefer Avast.

[ShyguyXPC]

same here, never have used it, but I know a few people that have, and have used it despite my advice to use free stuff like Avast, AVG and Avira. (installed it on a friends PC once, because they were insistent on it being better than the free stuff).

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Damn, I thought the 1st page was too dang long to read, too much info, but its 6 pages long

Pot kettle black...???



I mean, when you start complaining about a long message........................it's gotta be long.....

[ShyguyXPC]

Pot kettle black...???



I mean, when you start complaining about a long message........................it's gotta be long.....

Um... No.


Nice try though.



But Here you go...

It’s early February in Cancun, Mexico. A group of 60 or so financial analysts, reporters, diplomats, and cybersecurity specialists shake off the previous night’s tequila and file into a ballroom at the Ritz-Carlton hotel. At the front of the room, a giant screen shows a globe targeted by crosshairs. Cancun is in the center of the bull’s-eye.


Also in this issue
Former McDonald’s Honchos Take On Sustainable Cuisine
Undead: The Rabies Virus Remains a Medical Mystery
Will Wright Wants to Make a Game Out of Life Itself
A ruddy-faced, unshaven man bounds onstage. Wearing a wrinkled white polo shirt with a pair of red sunglasses perched on his head, he looks more like a beach bum who’s lost his way than a business executive. In fact, he’s one of Russia’s richest men—the CEO of what is arguably the most important Internet security company in the world. His name is Eugene Kaspersky, and he paid for almost everyone in the audience to come here. “Buenos dias,” he says in a throaty Russian accent, as he apologizes for missing the previous night’s boozy activities. Over the past 72 hours, Kaspersky explains, he flew from Mexico to Germany and back to take part in another conference. “Kissinger, McCain, presidents, government ministers” were all there, he says. “I have panel. Left of me, minister of defense of Italy. Right of me, former head of CIA. I’m like, ‘Whoa, colleagues.’”

He’s bragging to be sure, but Kaspersky may be selling himself short. The Italian defense minister isn’t going to determine whether criminals or governments get their hands on your data. Kaspersky and his company, Kaspersky Lab, very well might. Between 2009 and 2010, according to Forbes, retail sales of Kaspersky antivirus software increased 177 percent, reaching almost 4.5 million a year—nearly as much as its rivals Symantec and McAfee combined. Worldwide, 50 million people are now members of the Kaspersky Security Network, sending data to the company’s Moscow headquarters every time they download an application to their desktop. Microsoft, Cisco, and Juniper Networks all embed Kaspersky code in their products—effectively giving the company 300 million users. When it comes to keeping computers free from infection, Kaspersky Lab is on its way to becoming an industry leader.

But this still doesn’t fully capture Kaspersky’s influence. Back in 2010, a researcher now working for Kaspersky discovered Stuxnet, the US-Israeli worm that wrecked nearly a thousand Iranian centrifuges and became the world’s first openly acknowledged cyberweapon. In May of this year, Kaspersky’s elite antihackers exposed a second weaponized computer program, which they dubbed Flame. It was subsequently revealed to be another US-Israeli operation aimed at Iran. In other words, Kaspersky Lab isn’t just an antivirus company; it’s also a leader in uncovering cyber-espionage.

Kaspersky has 300 million customers. His geek squad uncovers US cyberweapons. And he has deep ties to the KGB’s successors in Moscow.
Serving at the pinnacle of such an organization would be a remarkably powerful position for any man. But Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB. Of course, none of this history is ever mentioned in Cancun.

What is mentioned is Kaspersky’s vision for the future of Internet security—which by Western standards can seem extreme. It includes requiring strictly monitored digital passports for some online activities and enabling government regulation of social networks to thwart protest movements. “It’s too much freedom there,” Kaspersky says, referring to sites like Facebook. “Freedom is good. But the bad guys—they can abuse this freedom to manipulate public opinion.”

These are not exactly comforting words from a man who is responsible for the security of so many of our PCs, tablets, and smartphones. But that is the paradox of Eugene Kaspersky: a close associate of the autocratic Putin regime who is charged with safeguarding the data of millions of Americans; a supposedly-retired intelligence officer who is busy today revealing the covert activities of other nations; a vital presence in the open and free Internet who doesn’t want us to be too free. It’s an enigmatic profile that’s on the rise as Kaspersky’s influence grows.



Eugene Kaspersky as a young Soviet military cadet.
Photo: courtesy Eugene Kaspersky
Eugene Kaspersky was a bright kid. At 16 he was accepted to a five-year program at the KGB-backed Institute of Cryptography, Telecommunications, and Computer Science. After graduating in 1987, he was commissioned as an intelligence officer in the Soviet army. A quarter century after the fact, he still won’t disclose what he did in the military or what exactly he studied at the institute. “That was top-secret, so I don’t remember,” he says.

Kaspersky is more open about the day in October 1989 when a virus first infected his computer. It was a playful little thing called Cascade that made the characters on a PC screen tumble to the bottom like Tetris blocks. Curious, Kaspersky saved a copy of the virus on a floppy disk to study how the code worked. A couple of weeks later he encountered a second virus, and then a third. His interest grew with each discovery. “For Eugene, it was an addiction,” his friend Alexey De Mont De Rique says. Each time a new virus appeared, Kaspersky would “sit in front of the computer for 20 hours straight,” trying to pick it apart, De Mont De Rique recalls. In the small world of antivirus researchers, the Soviet officer quickly made a name for himself.

By the early ’90s, Kaspersky wanted out of the army so he could study viruses full-time. There was one small problem: “It was almost not possible,” he explains. The only way to get out was to go to jail, get sick, or prove yourself to be extremely incompetent. Kaspersky’s old instructor at the Institute of Cryptography had a company that sold everything from athletic shoes to PCs. Somehow—Kaspersky won’t answer questions about this either—the former professor was able to get Kaspersky a discharge and hire him. Kaspersky’s wife, Natalya, and De Mont De Rique soon joined him at the company.

In 1997 the three of them went into the antivirus business for themselves. Their software was advanced for the time. They were the first to allow users of Internet security software to watch malware operate in an isolated “sandbox,” quarantined from the rest of the computer; they were among the first to store entire programs in a virus database. The young company flourished even as Kaspersky’s marriage to Natalya fizzled. The couple divorced in 1998, but she continued to handle sales and finance while he worked in the “virus lab,” classifying new threats himself. “The typical analyst would process maybe 100 pieces of new malware a day,” says Aleks Gostev, one of Kaspersky’s top researchers. “Eugene would do 300.”

Today Kaspersky Lab employs about 200 virus researchers—some in the US and China, but the bulk of them in a converted electronics factory 6 miles northwest of the Kremlin. On a sunny April morning when I visit, the old factory feels more like a grad school, with tattooed twentysomethings from across the former Soviet Union roaming the curved halls. The school mascot seems to be Kaspersky himself. Some employees wear Che Guevara T-shirts—with the boss’s face replacing the revolutionary’s. On the walls are black-and-white photos of long-serving employees dressed in war paint and moccasins like Native Americans. “Eugene the Great Virus Hunter,” reads the caption under the CEO’s image—in which he’s drawing a bow and arrow. Some 12,543 emails about suspicious programs came into the company just this morning, bringing the grand total to nearly 7.8 million.

‘Rule number one of successful companies here is good relations with the secret police.’
The accumulation happens automatically. When a user installs Kaspersky software, it scans every application, file, and email on the computer for signs of malicious activity. If it finds a piece of known malware, it deletes it. If it encounters a suspicious program or a message it doesn’t recognize—and the user has opted to be part of the Kaspersky Security Network—it sends an encrypted sample of the virus to the company’s servers. The cloud-based system automatically checks the code against a “whitelist” of 300 million software objects it knows to be trustworthy, as well as a “blacklist” of 94 million known malicious objects. If the code can’t be found on either of these lists, the system analyzes the program’s behavior—looking at whether it’s designed to make unauthorized changes to the computer’s configuration options, for example, or whether it constantly pings a remote server. Only in the rare instance that the system is stumped will one of Kaspersky’s T-shirt-clad virus researchers step in. They’ll characterize the code by function: password stealer, bogus web page server, downloader of more malicious programs. Then they’ll suggest a “signature” that can be used to spot and filter out the malware in the future. In just minutes, a software update that incorporates these new signatures can be pushed out to Kaspersky’s tens of millions of users.

This is the core of the $600-million-a-year business that grew out of Kaspersky’s virus hobby. It’s really not all that different from the way US security companies like Symantec or McAfee operate globally. Except for the fact that in Russia, high tech firms like Kaspersky Lab have to cooperate with the siloviki, the network of military, security, law enforcement, and KGB veterans at the core of the Putin regime.

The FSB, a successor to the KGB, is now in charge of Russia’s information security, among many other things. It is the country’s top fighter of cybercrime and also operates the government’s massive electronic surveillance network. According to federal law number 40-FZ (.pdf), the FSB can not only compel any telecommunications business to install “extra hardware and software” to assist it in its operations, the agency can assign its own officers to work at a business. “Rule number one of successful companies here is good relations with the siloviki,” says one prominent member of Russia’s technology sector.

Kaspersky says the FSB has never made a request to tamper with his software, nor has it tried to install its agents in his company. But that doesn’t mean Kaspersky and the security agency operate at arm’s length. Quite the opposite: “A substantial part of his company is intimately involved with the FSB,” the tech insider says. While the Russian government has used currency restrictions to cripple a firm’s international business in the past, Kaspersky faces no such interference. “They give him carte blanche for his overseas operations, because he’s among the so-called good companies.”


Eugene Kaspersky’s lab isn’t just an antivirus company; it’s also a leader in uncovering cyber-espionage.
Photo: Stephen Voss
Next door to the Moscow virus lab is the home base for another arm of the operation—a team of elite hackers from around the world that Kaspersky hand-selected to investigate new or unusual cybersecurity threats. Kaspersky calls this his Global Research and Expert Analysis Team—GREAT, for short. Two of them are waiting for me in their office. Sergei Golovanov sports rectangular glasses and a beard out of a ’90s nu-metal video. Aleks Gostev is skinny as a rope and has dark circles under his eyes.

With Kaspersky’s encouragement, GREAT has become increasingly active in helping big companies and law enforcement agencies track down cybercriminals. Gostev assisted Microsoft in its takedown of the Kelihos botnet, which churned out 3.8 billion pieces of spam every day at its peak. Golovanov spent months chasing the Koobface gang, which suckered social media users out of an estimated $7 million.

One of GREAT’s frequent partners in fighting cybercrime, however, is the FSB. Kaspersky staffers serve as an outsourced, unofficial geek squad to Russia’s security service. They’ve trained FSB agents in digital forensic techniques, and they’re sometimes asked to assist on important cases. That’s what happened in 2007, when agents showed up at Kaspersky HQ with computers, DVDs, and hard drives they had seized from suspected crooks. “We had no sleep for a month,” Golovanov says. Eventually two Russian virus writers were arrested, and Nikolai Patrushev, then head of the FSB, emailed the team his thanks.

Kaspersky’s public-sector work, however, goes well beyond Russia. In May, Gostev and Kaspersky were summoned to the Geneva headquarters of the International Telecommunication Union, the UN body charged with encouraging development of the Internet. The Russians were ushered into the office of ITU secretary-general Hamadoun Touré, where the Soviet-educated satellite engineer told them that a virus was erasing information on the computers of Iran’s oil and gas ministry. This was coming just two years after the discovery of the Stuxnet worm, which had damaged Iran’s centrifuges. Touré asked Kaspersky to look into it.

Back at the lab, analysts from GREAT began combing through archived reports from customers’ machines. One file name stood out: ~DEB93D.tmp. The virus was eventually found on 417 customers’ computers—398 of which were in the Middle East, including 185 in Iran. Some machines had been infected since 2010, but the file had never been deeply analyzed. The researchers were able to isolate one piece of the malicious code—and then another and another.

One module of the software surreptitiously turned on a machine’s microphone and recorded any audio it captured. A second collected files, especially design and architectural drawings. A third uploaded captured data to anonymous command-and-control servers. A fourth module, with the file name Flame, infected other computers. The analysts discovered about 20 modules in all—an entire toolkit for online espionage. It was one of the biggest, most sophisticated pieces of spyware ever discovered. In honor of the transmission program, the researchers called it Flame. On May 28, a Kaspersky analyst announced what the team had found.

Flame was another part of America’s shadow war against Iran — and Kaspersky killed it.
The spyware was too complex for simple crooks or hacktivists, the researchers said. Flame had been coded by professionals, almost certainly at a government’s behest. The company called it a cyberweapon and speculated that it was related to Stuxnet.

On June 1, The New York Times revealed for the first time that the White House had, in fact, ordered the deployment of Stuxnet as part of a sophisticated campaign of cyberespionage and sabotage against Tehran. Then, on June 19, The Washington Post was able to confirm that Flame was yet another part of this shadow war against Iran. Kaspersky had outed—and in effect killed—it.

For Kaspersky, exposing Flame reflects his company’s broader ambition: to serve as a global crime-stopper and peacekeeper. Malware has evolved from a nuisance to a criminal tool to an instrument of the state, he says, so naturally he and his malware fighters have grown in stature and influence too. “My goal is not to earn money. Money is like oxygen: Good idea to have enough, but it’s not the target,” he says. “The target is to save the world.”

In a locked room down the hall from his office, Kaspersky is working on a secret project to fulfill that lofty ambition. Not even his assistant has been allowed inside. But after we’ve spent a day together—and knocked back a few shots of Chivas 12—he unlocks the door and offers me a peek. It’s an industrial control system, a computer for operating heavy machinery, just like the ones that Stuxnet attacked (and, Kaspersky researchers believe, Flame may also have targeted). Kaspersky’s team is quietly working on new ways to harden these systems against cyberattack—to protect the power grids and prisons and sewage plants that rely on these controllers. The idea is to make future Stuxnets harder to pull off. The controllers haven’t been engineered with security in mind, so the project is difficult. But if it succeeds, Kaspersky’s seemingly outsize vision of his company’s role in the world might become a little less outlandish.

In the meantime, there’s always politics.


Kaspersky at the 2011 Brazilian Grand Prix, flanked by drivers from the Ferrari F1 team that he sponsors.
Photo: courtesy of Kaspersky Lab
Kaspersky has cultivated the image of a wild man with cash to burn—the flamboyant say-anything, do-anything, drink-anything gazillionaire. In Asia, he’s clowned around in TV commercials with Jackie Chan. In Europe, Kaspersky sponsors the Ferrari Formula One team and goes on Dublin pub crawls with Bono. Back in Russia, he throws New Year’s parties for 1,500. The most recent one had a rock-and-roll theme; Kaspersky took the stage in a Harley jacket. Last summer he took some 30 people to Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula for a volcano-hiking excursion. Then there are the Kaspersky Lab conferences disguised as boozy getaways (or perhaps vice versa): the “analysts’ summit” on Spain’s Costa del Sol, the “VIP executive forum” in Monte Carlo, the “press tour” in Cyprus, the whatever-it-was thing in Cancun.

All of this might lead some to dismiss Kaspersky as a dilettante plutocrat who drinks single-malt and gets made up for TV while his employees do the real technical work. But the critics would be missing the point: One of the systems Kaspersky is now trying to hack is politics, and his antics are part of the act. Every trip to Shanghai’s Formula One race or the London Conference on Cyberspace is another chance to court diplomats and politicians, another chance to extend his company’s influence. And one of his goals is to persuade policymakers to refashion the Internet into something more to his liking—and, as it happens, something more to the liking of the Putin government as well.

Kaspersky says it’s time to give up privacy online: ‘By protecting our right to freedom we actually sacrifice it!’
In one hotel ballroom after another, Kaspersky insists that malware like Stuxnet and Flame should be banned by international treaty, like sarin gas or weaponized anthrax. He argues that the Internet should be partitioned and certain regions of it made accessible only to users who present an “Internet passport.” That way, anonymous hackers wouldn’t be able to get at sensitive sites—like, say, nuclear plants. Sure, it might seem like we’d be sacrificing some privacy online. But with all the advertisers, search engines, and governments tracking us today, Kaspersky argues, we don’t really have any privacy left anyway. “You can have privacy if you live somewhere in the jungle or the middle of Siberia,” he recently told a confab in the Bahamas.

The Internet grew from a network of researchers to the global nervous system in large part because practically anyone was able to access any part of it from anywhere—no ID needed. And the values of openness, freedom, and anonymity became deeply embedded in net culture and in the very architecture of the network itself. But to Kaspersky, these notions no longer work: By “protecting our right to freedom we actually sacrifice it! We sacrifice the right to safe Internet surfing and to not get infected by some nasty piece of malware at every step.”

The idea of stripping some amount of privacy from the Internet is gaining traction in many sectors, thanks at least in small part to Kaspersky’s lobbying. In Cancun, he was joined onstage by Alexander Ntoko, a top official at the International Telecommunication Union. “Why don’t we have digital IDs as a de facto for everybody?” he asks. “When I’m going to my bank, I’m not going to cover my face.” In other words, why should things be any different online?

The ITU was once a bureaucratic backwater. In recent years, however, the Russian and Chinese governments have been pushing to give the agency a central role in governing the Internet. Instead of the US-dominated nonprofits that currently coordinate domain names and promote technical standards, they want to turn authority over to a gathering of national governments represented by the ITU. It’s a move that one of the Internet’s creators, Vint Cerf, told Congress risks “losing the open and free Internet,” because it would transfer power from geeks to government bureaucrats. The ITU is set to revisit the 24-year-old treaty governing international telecommunications in December.

Whether or not it secures this power, the ITU has found a willing ally in Kaspersky. When he traveled to ITU headquarters in Geneva, a few months after Cancun, Kaspersky not only agreed to look into the attacks on the Iranian oil ministry, he also told ITU chief Touré that he would assign some of his top researchers to be on call to help the organization with any future investigations. It’s a good deal for both men. Kaspersky gets to extend his influence—and maybe catch the next big cyberweapon. Touré and the ITU get a personal cybersecurity team.

But Kaspersky’s closest political ties remain in Russia. As one of his country’s most successful technology entrepreneurs—and, in many ways, Russia’s spokesman for all things Internet—Kaspersky has hosted former president and current prime minister Dmitry Medvedev in his offices (see video below); Medvedev, in turn, appointed Kaspersky to serve in Russia’s Public Chamber, which is charged with monitoring the parliament.

Kaspersky and the Moscow government have espoused strikingly similar views on cybersecurity. This goes beyond the security industry’s basic mission of keeping data safe. When Kaspersky or Kremlin officials talk about responses to online threats, they’re not just talking about restricting malicious data—they also want to restrict what they consider malicious information, including words and ideas that can spur unrest.

Kaspersky can’t stand social networks like Facebook or its Russian competitor, VK (formerly known as VKontakte). “People can manipulate others with the fake information,” he says, “and it’s not possible to find who they are. It’s a place for very dangerous action.” Especially dangerous, he says, is the role of social networks in fueling protest movements from Tripoli to Moscow, where blogger Alexei Navalny has emerged as perhaps the most important dissident leader and sites like VK and LiveJournal have helped bring tens of thousands of people into the streets. Kaspersky sees these developments as part of a disinformation campaign by antigovernment forces to “manipulate crowds and change public opinion.”

Nikolai Patrushev—the former FSB chief who now serves as Putin’s top security adviser—makes a nearly identical case. In June he told a reporter that outside forces on the Internet are constantly creating tensions within Russian society. “Foreign sites are spreading political speculation, calls to unauthorized protests,” he says.

Russia’s government and its most famous technology entrepreneur have long had each other’s backs, cooperating on cybercrime investigations and supporting each other’s political agendas. But the two became utterly intertwined at 6:30 in the morning on April 19, 2011, when Kaspersky’s cell phone rang in his London hotel room. According to the caller ID, it was Ivan, Kaspersky’s 20-year-old son. But the voice on the other end was not Ivan. It was an older man who politely told Kaspersky: “We’ve got your son.”


Eugene Kaspersky now travels in Russia with bodyguards, after the kidnapping of his son.
Photo: Stephen Voss
Outwardly, Kaspersky didn’t react to the news of Ivan’s kidnapping. He said he was tired and asked the caller to ring him back later in the morning—which the caller did, from another number. This time, Kaspersky said he was in an interview and told the guy to make a third call.

And thats not even the ENTIRE first page, I had to cut nearly 10,000 Characters of text out of it to just quote and add to this post.

25K Character limit for the post, the first page was 34K+ Long.

Need I have to add that this was Page 1 of 6?

So, no, Not even close to my threads or postings.

[Nude_Lewd_Man]

Um... No.


Nice try though.



But Here you go...




And thats not even the ENTIRE first page, I had to cut nearly 10,000 Characters of text out of it to just quote and add to this post.

25K Character limit for the post, the first page was 34K+ Long.

Need I have to add that this was Page 1 of 6?

So, no, Not even close to my threads or postings.

You should have preceded that with #WallOfText...!!

[ShyguyXPC]

what, and ruin the fun?

[Taxmancometh]

I use a German made product: Avira!

[emilyo]

What Wired Is Not Telling You – a Response to Noah Shachtman’s Article in Wired Magazine | Nota Bene

"This is a very unusual post. It’s not about cyber-crime, malware, our latest business achievements or my latest long journey around the globe. It’s about truth and facts, and the importance of not hiding certain facts while revealing others.

For sure I was surprised to read such an article from a journalist who, up until Monday, always seemed to maintain the highest of professional and ethical standards. And it goes without saying that, on behalf of my company and our 2400+ employees around the world, I have to object to Mr. Shachtman’s litany of inferences, opinions, omissions and errors.

We first got to know Mr. Shachtman early last fall, and then invited him to our headquarters in Moscow. After several meetings with me and our team members, during which we discussed many different current issues related to the security field, it appears Noah Shachtman thought that he was ready to tell the world the “truth” about Kaspersky Lab and me personally, and decided to produce an article for Wired Magazine. And he got off to a great start (the way he described me after practically 72 hours on planes (Cancun-Munich-Cancun) just to be there for the opening of the event was all very true – and to me very amusing). But unfortunately Mr. Shachtman forgot to include essential components such as key facts, independent international experts’ opinions, and independent marketing research agencies’ data. Not only did he forget to check his facts, in some cases he wrote almost the opposite of what I actually said in my numerous interviews with him over the past seven months.

I hope Noah tried to do his best and had no hidden agenda. But he unfortunately failed to present to you the whole truth. So I’ve decided to help him out.

Thus, let me give you the information that Noah decided to hide from you:

Kaspersky Lab is a private international company that registered its holding in Great Britain in 2006. This means that our financial reporting is transparent and freely available to anyone. I think we can all agree that Her Majesty’s laws are strong and respected worldwide. Our affairs there have nothing to do with the Kremlin. This is the first time I’ve seen this major stretch to try and link our business with the Russian government.

All three of the world’s leading security companies – Symantec, McAfee/Intel, and Kaspersky Lab – work with law enforcement bodies worldwide to help fight cyber-crime. The ITU, CET, FBI, FSB, U.S. Secret Service… we all have a duty to help them solve criminal cases. Remember “Raiders of the Lost Ark” with Indiana Jones? He was a archeologist – the best on the planet. And that’s why the U.S. military came to him for help; they knew nothing about history or mythology. Well it’s the same for what we do for governments worldwide today – we provide EXPERTISE. Nothing more.

Without the expertise of security professionals, successful law enforcement operations would be an unattainable dream. When cyber-crime cases are domestic, IT Security companies work with their law enforcement agencies to assist in investigations. When they’re international, they work with appropriate law enforcement authorities of the affected countries to abide by legal policies and federal jurisdictions. This cooperation is crucial in helping stop cyber-crime around the world, and we are proud to be a part of this process.

We were the first to reveal Flame - and we are very proud of the fact. No IT Security company would remain silent on the discovery of a cyber-weapon, no matter who the author might be. Among the most well-known large computer security companies, two are U.S.-based – Symantec and McAfee. Symantec wrote one of the most comprehensive papers on Stuxnet – “the US-Israeli worm that wrecked nearly a thousand Iranian centrifuges and became the world’s first openly acknowledged cyberweapon,” as Noah described it in his article. In addition, Symantec was the first to write about Duqu, which has been widely referred to as Stuxnet’s cousin. Along with Symantec, McAfee published several research posts about both Stuxnet and Duqu, reporting on the incident and noting, in the case of Duqu, that its research team, in addition to many other vendors, were alerted to the unknown malware and began actively monitoring and responding to the threat. Following Noah’s logic, both U.S. companies may be considered to have been foiling US spies as well. However, the logic of the IT Security industry is to focus on keeping customers safe – regardless of their origin, or the origin of the malware.

As you all know, I’m an active blogger and engage in plenty of social media. I have an active presence on Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal. I’m an active supporter of the possibilities social networking brings to open communication and dialogue. I constantly stress that social networks can be used for positive things, and would never wish this medium to be shut down or censored. Besides, I personally am open to all kinds of questions and dialogue. As is Kaspersky Lab as a whole. If you want to know something – anything, just ask: we’ve nothing to hide.

As to Russian elections and DDoS attacks on certain (mostly opposition) websites, Noah regrettably gave a totally false account of the situation. I explained what was really happening at that time to the Russian audience of the Ekho Moskvy radio station, in addition to posting the same explanation on my blog. Early on, we didn’t see any DDoS attacks occurring, but we asked any possible victims of attacks to contact us so we could assist in investigations. After my blogpost some possible victims did contact us, and after analyzing all the data we discovered that some were indeed attacked. However, we found that not all of the attacks were DDoS-based. As an example, Kommersant.ru’s IT director, German Mitrofanov, told Gazeta.ru that they experienced a technical problem instead of a DDoS. In addition, our team of experts continued to monitor the DDoS and technical attacks around election time, and posted its findings in March 2012.

And finally, the very mission of our company is to fight cyber-crime all around the world – together with our colleagues in the industry. We don’t do it just because it happens to be our business; we also do it because we believe that protecting the world from malware is critically important and will continue to allow us to live in a better, safer, more open and effective society. It’s our underlying principle by which we stand firmly and always will.

In all, there are dozens of misquotes, unsourced comments, personal judgments based on mere opinion – or prejudice – and factual mistakes in the article. Not to mention an overall negative undertone that permeates the whole article.

Finally, on a very personal note. With regard to when my son was kidnapped… Every parent would understand my feelings and intent when I’d say to Noah Shachtman that only tabloids dare speculate on serious family misfortunes. Doing so would be punching below the belt even for a most scandalously unethical rag of a publication. But for Wired to sink so low – that’s a clear downgrade of the publication’s stature.

Noah Shachtman wants to believe that I’m a spy and Kremlin team member, and that I use my son as bait… I guess this could only be due to cold-war paranoia. I honestly can’t think what else it could be. The reality however is much more mundane – I’m just a man who’s “here to save the world”.

And this is what Noah Shachtman failed to tell you."

[GroundZero3]

Thanks for posting this, im curious to see if Wired will say anything more about it

[JEROY]

Sounds like a Big Brother coming Alive ..