Kaspersky To Transfer US Customers To UltraAV After Ban (pcmag.com) 16
Kaspersky has reached an agreement to transfer its U.S. customers to UltraAV, a Boston-based antivirus provider. The move comes in the wake of a White House ban on Kaspersky products. Under the deal, U.S. users will maintain their existing subscriptions and receive "reliable anti-virus protection" through UltraAV, which will offer additional features such as VPN and identity theft protection. Kaspersky will contact customers in the coming days with instructions for activating their new accounts.
Move to the U.S. (Score:1)
If Kaspersky was smart, they would move their company to the U.S. -- Problem solved.
Re:Move to the U.S. (Score:4, Insightful)
As long as any employees of significance are in Russia, it's compromised. With a lot of businesses that is perhaps not a huge risk, but when your product has low-level access to computers... Probably not worth the risk.
Re:Move to the U.S. (Score:4, Interesting)
but when your product has low-level access to computers... Probably not worth the risk.
A portion of their product has low-level access. It is likely a very small number of people in the company involved in writing the low-level drivers.
As for the possibility of the dev process being compromised by a government operation -- this is possible with Any company. Being a US company with No employees who are Russian citizens that you are aware of Does not mean the Russian government cannot sneak operatives into your organization.
Even companies with Only US offices and all US Citizen employees would still have this as a major risk.
In that case ALL Antivirus companies should be concerned, And we should be extremely wary about all Antivirus companies.
Re:Move to the U.S. (Score:4, Informative)
I think you're likely to find living where Putin can get to you easily is a greater risk than where he can't. There's a big difference between the US and Russia on that particular score.
But no, it is not impossible, and that's why intelligence agencies exist.
Re: (Score:2)
So almost all employees are in Russia, they would fire themself and move to the USA for what, to make the USA happy? For sure the USA would not approve a mass Russia migration to the USA, FSB would be happy if they did!! simply no, just lose some money and keep doing business, with the same people on other places, USA are not the all world
What's the provenance? (Score:4, Interesting)
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hey, it is a USA company, so NSA have you cover, they have monopoly for that
Re:What's the provenance? (Score:4, Informative)
> Any specific assurances or proof that it's not just going to forward any customer information back to Russia?
Is there any evidence Kaspersky did that at all? They would destroy their revenue flow forever if they ever got caught.
What happened is they disclosed an alleged NSA/Apple conspiracy to spy on Apple users (including notable journalists) and the DC Mafia got their revenge.
https://arstechnica.com/securi... [arstechnica.com]
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So how much recourse did TrueCrypt have?
Re: (Score:2)
I know people who still use Avast, even after they were caught stealing users' browsing history and more.
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Presumably their customers were not worried about that before.
It's actually great service. Most companies would have just said "too bad, we are holding up our end of the contract. Take it up with your government."
So, who is UltraAV? (Score:2)
The article mentions that UltraAV is basically an unknown at this point. It's owned by Pango, which has been buying up VPN services. But there's precious little info on UltraAV out there, never mind actual technical testing/reviews of how well it performs.
Does anyone have any experience with them?
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I have never heard of it too.