Kaspersky: We uploaded classifieds US documents but immediately deleted them

Sometime in 2014, a group of analysts walked into the office of Kaspersky Lab founder and CEO Eugene Kaspersky to deliver some sobering news. The company’s anti-virus software had automatically scraped powerful digital surveillance tools off a computer in the United States and the analysts were worried: the data’s headers clearly identified the files as classified.

“They immediately came to my office,” Kaspersky recalled, “and they told me that they have a problem.”

He said there was no hesitation about what to do with the cache. “It must be deleted,” Kaspersky says he told them.

Associated Press sees in the incident, recounted by Kaspersky during a brief telephone interview on Tuesday and supplemented by a timeline and other information provided by company officials, “the first public acknowledgement of that Kaspersky’s anti-virus program uploaded powerful digital espionage tools belonging to the NSA from a computer in the United States and sent them to servers in Moscow.”