US Senators want Kaspersky shut out of military contracts

Who cares?

It's all just snake oil anyway.

Hint: If you allow the nasties onto your computer in order to scan them ... then you have allowed nasties onto your computer. That's a trifle simplistic, but think about it.

Oh FFS!

Bring back Joe McCarthy, all is forgiven!

But what would Trump do if the military was nasty to his Russkie buddies? Fire the generals?

letting Russia's government plant backdoors in his products would be “suicide”.

That refers, I assume, to the adding of backdoors being "commercial suicide".

In contrast, if the wrong sort of government makes "an offer you can't refuse"; refusing it anyway might be seen as the other form of suicide.

Let them eat Symantec

The poor unfortunate users will be begging to have the backdoored communist spyware back. If their computers run fast enough to let them compose an email of complaint.

Russia 'won't rule out' retaliation

will shut out Kaspersky of Russian contracts as well!

...

yeah, I know, cheap trick, childish and patronising to imply Russians would be so stupid, bad, bad, bad! But then, consider real-life Russian response to sanctions, when they blocked food imports that hurt them more then the exporters...

What about Veeam?

Will they be banning Veeam Backup software, too?

There is a hypothetical risk

Technically if the US-Russia situation escalated further, Russia could very well weaponise Kaspersky software no matter what Eugene himself thinks or whether he would protest it.

Since AV always run at very high privileges they could just push out an AV or program update that changes system behaviour. The updates could be directed via geolocation or if the update requests contain eg. the Kaspersky contract ID or other identifying material. This would of course leave a smoking gun.

Similarly any American AV software could be used for attacks if need be. The US government has their FISA and other avenues to subvert companies under their will.

Vulnerable..

Their argument is that Eugene's company is vulnerable to Russian government influence

Well they are..

Same way as Microsoft, Cisco, Symantec, Apple, Amazon, (do I really need to complete this list) are vulnerable to US government not only influence but active measures to infiltrate, backdoor and compromise. As long as we have secret courts and secret orders this is going to be an issue - but even if they didn't exist tradecraft renders these systems vulnerable. There's zero transparency in the industry is half the problem, everything is closely guarded secret. No obvious solutions here.

I don't think there's a good solution to this. Even open source can't truly save you from this stuff. If we all hide in our corners we're going to have a serious problem. Until the US government finds evidence of wrongdoing they should keep it to themselves.

I personally consider Romania as neutral ground as you can get and use Bitdefender - though I'm completely aware that they're open to Russian and US asset infiltration and therefore also won't help defend from either the US or Russian states. I consider it safest middle ground though.

I don't think anybody can go around, especially in government and military ops, pretending this isn't a possibility.

Once upon a time...

I'm old enough to remember when the military never, ever, used equipment, etc. from another country where mission critical security was needed. Paranoia? At the time, yes, but it was just a step to ensure that things that needed to be secure were kept secure and that if someone decided to cut off the supply (the other country's leaders) then the military wouldn't be compromised.

The software might be secure but there's no guarantee that it will stay that way. I'll get my tin foil hat and have a lie down in a few.

The US wan't this paranoid during the War. Sheesh! Welcome to conservative politics.

Given the low level system access that AV and other security tools need to do their job on an endpoint I'd be surprised if the US military used software from outside the US.

NSL

So I assume that the Kaspersky crew were served with National Security Letters and now cannot talk about whatever transpired. So by next week, their software will likely have a US backdoor in it.

political payoff

It seems after months of unfounded accusations, trillions in economic activity lost and broadcasting security procedures that the real reason has been found. Much like the time the DOJ stole software for tracking prisoners from an individual it seems some political nincompoop wants a fat contract without working for it.