“The company securing your Internet has close ties to Russian spies,” Bloomberg asserts in a story published last week.
The news agency sees a predestination to spying in every milestone of the life of Kaspersky Labs founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky: “He was educated at a KGB-sponsored cryptography institute, then worked for Russian military intelligence, and in 2007, one of the company’s Japanese ad campaigns used the slogan ‘A Specialist in Cryptography from KGB.’”
With 400 million customers relying on Kaspersky Lab’s software, the Moscow-based company ranks sixth in revenue among security-software makers, taking in $667 million in 2013, Bloomberg notes.
After considering a western IPO, Kaspersky Lab took a new course in 2012, according to the Bloomberg reporters. “Since then, high-level managers have left or been fired, their jobs often filled by people with closer ties to Russia’s military or intelligence services.”
Cyber spying via Russian saunas
Some of these people actively aid criminal investigations by the FSB, the KGB’s successor, using data from some of the company’s customers, Bloomberg heard from “six current and former employees who declined to discuss the matter publicly because they feared reprisals.”
“This closeness starts at the top: Unless Kaspersky is traveling, he rarely misses a weekly banya (sauna) night with a group of about 5 to 10 that usually includes Russian intelligence officials.”
Chief Legal Officer Igor Chekunov, who regularly joins these banya nights, is “the point man for the company’s work with the Russian government,” believes Bloomberg, still referring to “insiders.”
The news agency also notes suspiciously that, “while Kaspersky Lab has published a series of reports that examined alleged electronic espionage by the U.S., Israel, and the U.K., the company hasn’t pursued alleged Russian operations with the same vigour.”
“Scoring high in bad journalism”
In an answer on his official blog, Eugene Kaspersky judged the Bloomberg article largely inaccurate or false, based on “speculations, assumptions, incorrect facts and unfair conclusions.”
“The authors have scored high in bad journalism,” the blog states, answering each of Bloomberg’s points of accusation or suspicion.
The Russian security expert admits that his company “cooperates with law enforcement agencies around the globe (including in the U.S., the UK, Japan, other European countries; INTERPOL and Europol),” and that “official meetings sometimes do turn pretty informal.”
These ties, however, stem from the necessity of fighting cybercrime. Without such cooperation, this battle would be “significantly less effective if not completely futile.”
“I consider the stories about my possible encounters with security officials in a banya an attempt to deliberately mislead readers,” Kaspersky writes, denying to have “EVER worked for the KGB.”
