Kaspersky Antivirus accused of creating fake malware for over 10 years

Here’s a crazy report: Kaspersky Lab, makers of a popular antivirus service, might have created fake malware for over ten years to harm its competitors. The software was benign, but Kaspersky fooled other antivirus software into marking it as infected. Two ex-employees told Reuters that the clandestine attack was originally meant to punish smaller rivals that Kaspersky felt were ‘stealing’ its technology.

It basically worked like this: Kaspersky would inject dangerous-looking code into common pieces of software. It would then anonymously submit the files to malware aggregators such as Google-owned VirusTotal. When competitors added the malware to their detection engines, they’d mistakenly flag the original files because of the similar code.