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Comment by kube-system | Hacker News Reader

Not sure it's really meaningful to simply say they're a "Russian company". More specifically, they're a company that has been accused of cooperating with the FSB in attacks against the US government.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaspersky_bans_and_allegations...

Whatever the case, it's probably wise to take their statements with some skepticism of bias in this regard.

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Role reversal: If a US antivirus company's heuristic and file analysis uploaded a trove of russian zero-day exploits they are using against their adversaries, you better damn well believe they're going to hand that over to the CIA/NSA and the CIA/NSA may weaponize them against our adversaries.

When it comes to US crafted malware, I trust the Russians in detecting it and telling the world more than I would any US-based company.

It is now. After decades of state lying "russian" has a well defined meaning now.

Or: "they're a company that has been accused without evidence of cooperating with the FSB in attacks against the US government by US entities aligned to the US-based actors that they have exposed".

FTFY.

I used the word "accused" intentionally. My pointing out a potential bias here is not a diminishment of anyone else's potential bias.

> without evidence of cooperating with the FSB

That isn't true. This "without evidence" shit is rather silly when it comes to top-secret sources and methods. Blow decades of work and risk getting people killed to Prove that an ex-KGB officer helps an authoritative regime thats known to poison its enemies. People said the same shit about Huawei, then all the KPN shit.

Link: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-07-11/kaspersky...

The problem with that is that those agencies also lie all the time. You can't have your cake and eat it too with a just trust us attitude and also make stuff up when it's convenient.

"We'll know our disinformation program is complete when everything the American public believes is false." - William J. Casey, former CIA Director

That said, I think the safest default assumption is both that any large national intelligence agency lies all the time, and also that any entity that a national intelligence agency has the means and motive to compromise is probably compromised. So Kaspersky is probably an FSB asset (but so too is Amazon a CIA/NSA asset) but the CIA is probably lying 99% of the time too.

> This "without evidence" shit is rather silly when it comes to top-secret sources and methods.

"We lie, we cheat, we steal". Literally from the mouth of the guy who ran it to your ears.

I'm not sure how you find these source legitimate sans evidence, other than possibly they are you team.

PS. Doesn't make the other jerks legitimate either.

> sans evidence

You're talking about an entity with the ability to fake any evidence that they would be able to provide you. So no matter what "evidence" they provide you would still need to make a choice to believe them.

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