Russia just sacked the guy implicated in organizing the DNC-hacking

[DetlefK]

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/25/world/europe/sergei-mikhailov-russian-cybercrimes-agent-arrested.html?_r=0

A senior official in the Russian cyberintelligence department that American officials say oversaw last year’s election hacking has been arrested in Moscow on charges of treason, a Russian newspaper reported Wednesday.

The arrest of Sergei Mikhailov, a senior officer of the Federal Security Service, or F.S.B., the main successor agency to the K.G.B., is a rare instance of turmoil in the country’s usually shadowy cybersecurity apparatus slipping into public view.

Mr. Mikhailov served in the F.S.B.’s Center for Information Security, the agency’s cyberintelligence branch, which has been implicated in the American election hacking. But it is not clear whether the arrest was related to those intrusions.

He was detained along with one of Russia’s leading private-sector cybersecurity experts, Ruslan Stoyanov, the head of computer incident response investigations at the Kaspersky Lab, which makes antivirus programs.


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Sure. Arrested for "treason". And in no way arrested to be silenced.



https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Magnitsky
Sergei Magnitsky was an auditor. He discovered a massive forgery- and corruption-case involving several russian judges. So, after having reported the fraud, he naturally was charged with being the ring-leader and died in jail before the end of the trial. And THEN, after his death, the trial continued and he was found guilty.

And that's how much official russian statements over arrests are worth.

[HoneyBadger]

1. Kaspersky Labs antivirus implicated in DNC hacking-get that shit off your laptop now

[Ilsa]

2. Is there a name the software goes by? NT

[DetlefK]

4. "Kaspersky Anti-Virus", "Kaspersky Internet Security" ...

[HoneyBadger]

6. 400 million users, 270,000 corporate clients are screwed

It may be too late to get that stuff off your computer - All your base are belong to us

[HoneyBadger]

8. Kaspersky was on their way to getting installed on every US government computer

Top Russian cybersecurity company Kaspersky Lab has recently lost the leader of its North American operations and the head of a Washington-area office as it struggles to win U.S. government contracts amid rising geopolitical mistrust.

Company Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky confirmed the changes in an interview with Reuters during a visit to China.

Kaspersky said the two personnel moves were not linked, and that North America head Christopher Doggett had gone to a competitor while Kaspersky "decided to change leadership in DC," where the two-year-old office pursues work protecting government agencies and critical infrastucture.

Doggett and former Washington-area head Adam Firestone declined to comment.

The shakeup comes at a time when Kaspersky says it is hard for non-American security companies to win bids for federal jobs and big U.S. corporate contracts.

"The North American top enterprise and government sector, they are not really loyal to any non-American products – it’s much harder to get to this sector for any non-American company, maybe except British companies," Kaspersky said.

"We’ve never had success in this sector in the United States. We are slowly trying to open the door. It’s hard but I think it’s possible."

A high-ranking U.S. technology official and former intelligence official, who asked not to be named, said Kaspersky government efforts, while always problematic, have faced higher hurdles in the past year due to tensions with Russia and concerns about the company specifically.

The changes follow the increasing politicization of the technology security sector. For a variety of reasons, prominent security companies are more likely to blow the whistle on spying or sabotage attacks originating in other countries and more likely to win contracts with their own home governments.

Kaspersky has been the foremost researcher uncovering Western government spyware for the past several years. Earlier this year, it said it had itself been attacked by one of the most sophisticated strains uncovered to date, with an intrusion it hinted came from U.S. ally Israel.

[Ilsa]

3. Now Putin will tell everyone that the problem

is resolved. We can go back to watching America's Got Talent.

[UCmeNdc]

5. Russia reeled him in to keep him out of US authorities hands.

There are Russian moles working against the US and for Russia within the NSA, CIA and FBI.

[Stellar]

7. Since they've got their main man Comey in the mix.

Now, they want to call it a day.

[dalton99a]

10. Bingo!

[FarCenter]

9. May have been the CIA mole who provided them with certainty that the hack was Russian

As the controversy progressed, the CIA provided more and more information to the effect that they had human intelligence from Russia that confirmed that the DNC hack was Russian.

This probably led Russian counterintelligence to this guy.

So by getting involved in the politics, the CIA burned their source.

[MineralMan]

11. I was always suspicious of Kaspersky anti-virus.

So I never put it on my computer. It had a good reputation for protecting systems, but perhaps it was infecting systems while doing that useful work.

While I have considerable programming experience, I am no expert on software that blocks viruses that might be attacking. That must require access at a primary level to our computers. Any access of that type can allow many other activities that might take place unnoticed by users.

I have no evidence that the software is malicious at some level. But I've always had suspicions. I don't like software that stays active and closely looks at what other software is up to. That's particularly dangerous to privacy and security.

[DetlefK]

12. Anti-Virus is simply scanning your data for certain patterns.

They are not looking for viruses. They are looking for certain code-patterns that are typical for known viruses.

For example, there is this freeware-game. The programmers used a special coding-technique to compress the whole game into just 96 kb, simply to show that they can. Except you cannot really run this game on computers because anti-virus software keeps deleting it because the same method used to compress the game is used to compress viruses and the anti-virus software mistakes the game for a virus.

[MineralMan]

13. Yes, that's what it's supposed to be doing.

If that's all it's doing, that's fine. However software that resides persistently in memory and acts at a level where it can look for those patterns is inherently dangerous if the software has any malicious intent.

We put a lot of trust in software publishers. Maybe too much.

For example, one of the shareware programs I wrote was in wide use, but paid registrations were few. For a time, I considered including a kill switch in the software that monitored how long it had been used. After a certain number of uses beyond the trial period, I could have had the program delete its own executable and other files and then shut down. A routine like that could easily have deleted essential operating system files, as well.

I decided not to do any of that, in the end. I finally created a new version of that popular utility program that was in the public domain and stopped supporting the shareware version. Eventually, I abandoned publishing shareware altogether.

We trust the software on our computers not to do malicious things. In most cases, that trust is justified. However, it's child's play to incorporate malicious code in any piece of software, and call on it at any time that you wish.

[dmosh42]

14. So now we should be happy??--sounds like fake news.