Three months after the United States’ Department of Homeland Security banned Kaspersky Lab software from all federal agencies, the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm says it has filed an appeal contesting the decision.
Co-founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky posted an open letter online Monday explaining why he feels the need to push back:
The company did not undertake this action lightly, but maintains that DHS failed to provide Kaspersky Lab with adequate due process and relied primarily on subjective, non-technical public sources like uncorroborated and often anonymously sourced media reports and rumors in issuing and finalizing the Directive. DHS has harmed Kaspersky Lab’s reputation and its commercial operations without any evidence of wrongdoing by the company.
CNET:
In enacting the ban, the DHS said it was concerned about alleged ties between Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence and other government agencies. The department also said Russian law allows Russian intelligence agencies to request or compel assistance from Kaspersky and to intercept communications on Russian networks.
Kaspersky Lab regularly claims it does not cooperate with espionage agencies from any country, including Russia, but just last week, a Russian hacker in custody posted documents tying Kaspersky to the FSB (Russia’s Federal Security Service). And in October, the New York Times detailed how Israeli intelligence officers broke into the Kaspersky Lab network in 2014 and watched Russian government hackers use the company's antivirus software to look for U.S. classified government programs.
Kaspersky Lab is not taking a financial hit from the government ban itself, but the DHS decision has had repercussions.
The value of Kaspersky’s software sales to the U.S. government totaled less than $54,000, or about 0.03 percent of its U.S. subsidiary’s sales in the United States, according to the complaint.
Still, the allegations about the software have hurt its much bigger consumer software business, prompting retailers such as Best Buy Co to pull Kaspersky products.
Kaspersky Lab asks court to overturn US government ban (CNET)
Kaspersky Lab asks court to overturn U.S. government software ban (Reuters)
U.S. moves to ban Kaspersky software in federal agencies amid concerns of Russian espionage (WaPo)
An Open Letter from Kaspersky Lab