Best Buy pulls Kaspersky's antivirus software from its shelves

[Porthos]

http://www.startribune.com/best-buy...are-from-russian-firm-from-shelves/443274603/
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/best-buy-pulls-kaspersky-apos-035100616.html

 

[HankArnold]

Are we headed back the the McCarthy style of thinking? BTW, it's kinda late. The horse is already out of the barn!!!

 

[cypress]

Ouch lol

 

[MDD1963]

I rather like the Russian patriotic music from the Battlefield 1 soundtrack....

(Now I am beginning to suspect myself of election interference!)

 

[Krynn72]

Welp, goodbye Kaspersky. With such a big company taking this step, its sure to have a domino effect with everyone dropping it out of suspicion. What a sad way to go, through no fault of their own.

 

[Markverhyden]

I'm not so sure that's going to be a big deal. I seem to remember that if you talk to the Sheep Squad they recommended Webroot because they get spiffed on it. Only time will tell though.

 

[TechPJC]

Best Buy pulls Kaspersky antivirus software from its shelves

Symantec/Norton is delighted...

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Yes thats whats going on for sure, in a country where there are constant exploits being discovered/sold/traded kaspersky has decided to risk everything to install a backdoor on every customers computer.

Thats not very realistic.

....actually if I owed an AV company and my job was to install a backdoor in the product it then I would simply include the backdoor in a patch sent to specific clients/government ip blocks. If I sent it to everyone it would be discovered too quickly.

 

[Markverhyden]

One of my favorite tech cartoons.

 

[fencepost]

Darn, that probably means that their "starter pack" that bundled a year of Office 365, a Microsoft wireless mouse, and a year of Kaspersky is no more - though I bought it a couple years ago, so it may already have been dead. For $50 it was a heck of a bargain, I wish I'd bought a couple more to extend my subscription.

The only bundle I see right now is meh - Office, a Wacom stylus and Trend Micro for $99, and I have no real use for 2 of those.

 

[GTP]

If the US Govt is worried about "backdoors," Best Buy should also pull every "chinese" made computer, gadget and component from their shelves as well.
...and why stop there? What about software from other foreign countries?
BTW, no-one batters an eye about Intel using the Intel Management Engine that's pretty much in every computer out there to spy on everyone!
http://www.techrepublic.com/article/is-the-intel-management-engine-a-backdoor/

 

[Umbra]

Kaspersky is a leader in security solution destined to home users, so obviously a threat to some US vendors ; some lobbying perfectly timed with the Trump's Russian crisis of DNC "hack" and you have these kind of news.

 

[phaZed]

I feel much of the response here is misguided/biased. I don't mean to even conflate this issue with the 'US/Election' garbage. Kaspersky has very tight ties with the FSB, as in, the FSB tells them what to do - and that's that.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...ab-has-been-working-with-russian-intelligence
https://www.extremetech.com/interne...-firm-kaspersky-lab-awfully-tight-russian-fsb
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/russia...rsky-labs-us-intelligence-denies-cia-hacking/
http://www.fudzilla.com/news/44076-kaspersky-worked-with-the-fsb-in-2008

Viceland has done an entire series on this with reporters on the ground in in the faces of these people... not a chance I would trust Kaspersky... sorry.

 

[Umbra]

Anyway all tech giants has links to their respective intel agencies, obvious and expected.

 

[phaZed]

Anyway all tech giants has links to their respective intel agencies, obvious and expected.

I would have to disagree. Maybe that holds true for the US and Russia, France (Emsisoft), etc... So are you admitting, as the representative from Emsisoft, that Emsisoft is in fact run by the Goverment and implements back doors and spies on it's users? Then I won't use that either.

I'll stick with Bitdefender from Romania of which the CIA said:

The posts aren’t complete enough to say for sure, but Bitdefender, a Romanian anti-virus product, seemed to cause CIA hackers a lot of trouble.
One post appears to suggest that Bitdefender could be defeated by a bit of tinkering. Or maybe not.
“Alas, we’ve just tried this,” a response to the post said. “Bitdefender is still mad.”
Bitdefender representative Marius Buterchi said the only conclusion to draw was that “we are detecting the CIA tools.”

https://apnews.com/53d65013e05142bc8211dd6f1a6558dd

Notice which ones were "easy to bypass": Comodo, Kaspersky, Avira, AVG and F-Secure.

See, in Romania, they have Ramnicu Valcea AKA Hackerville/Cybercrime Central as seen on Motherboard's special:

So, I sincerely doubt the Romanian government is actively controlling Bitdefender - considering they turn a blind eye to this type of stuff. Welcome to be corrected, however, the argument "everyone does it, so who cares" is a dangerous and reckless position to take, and IMO, unnecessary and unsubstantiated.

 

[Umbra]

I would have to disagree. Maybe that holds true for the US and Russia, France (Emsisoft), etc... So are you admitting, as the representative from Emsisoft, that Emsisoft is in fact run by the Goverment and implements back doors and spies on it's users? Then I won't use that either.

I'll stick with Bitdefender from Romania of which the CIA said:

https://apnews.com/53d65013e05142bc8211dd6f1a6558dd

Notice which ones were "easy to bypass": Comodo, Kaspersky, Avira, AVG and F-Secure.

See, in Romania, they have Ramnicu Valcea AKA Hackerville/Cybercrime Central as seen on Motherboard's special:

So, I sincerely doubt the Romanian government is actively controlling Bitdefender - considering they turn a blind eye to this type of stuff. Welcome to be corrected, however, the argument "everyone does it, so who cares" is a dangerous and reckless position to take, and IMO, unnecessary and unsubstantiated.

Not what i said at all, please read carefully each words i wrote...

first i didn't say i don't care.

Secondly, what i meant is to be a giant (Microsoft, Apple, Google, etc...) harvesting billions of dollars, you can't do it without some "interest" from government intel agencies especially when you collect datas from users worldwide and if you don't "help" them in some ways , you may loss some "benefits" or worse.
Some companies are even funded by the CIA via a known foundation, doesn't mean they are becoming all active spies...

FYI, Emsisoft is based in New Zealand , and we are a very small "online" company but quite known in the security scene.

 

[GTP]

AAFAIK, Emsisoft uses Bitdefender's engine?

Interesting that the video was "presented" by Norton, who had their own problems.
This did't seem to cause the same kickback against Symantec as it did against Kaspersky.
Why?
Because it's not "Russian?"

 

[Umbra]

AAFAIK, Emsisoft uses Bitdefender's engine?

yes right and we added our own engine on top for newly discovered threats

 

[kpk1]

So, to add to this debate, who the hell do you go to for antivirus now....

Sent from my SM-G935F using Tapatalk

 

[Umbra]

So, to add to this debate, who the hell do you go to for antivirus now....

does mentioning my company's product will be interpreted as advertisement & spam ?