Stefan Mileschin

Russian security software outfit Kaspersky Lab has been accused of damaging rivals in the marketplace by tricking their antivirus software programs into classifying benign files as malicious.

Two employees have told Reuters that a secret campaign targeted Microsoft, AVG, Avast Software and others fooling some of them into deleting or disabling important files on their customers’ PCs.

Some of the attacks were ordered by Kaspersky Lab’s co-founder, Eugene Kaspersky, in part to retaliate against smaller rivals that he felt were aping his software instead of developing their own technology.

Kaspersky Lab has strongly denied that it had tricked competitors into categorising clean files as malicious, so-called false positives and said that such actions were “unethical, dishonest and their legality is at least questionable”.

http://www.techeye.net/news/kaspersk...framing-rivals