Nobody within the hacking scene actually believed that story. It’s remarkable that there’s been 0 evidence that Kaspersky has ever had a backdoor yet so many people believe it.

The NSA’s own incompetence led them to run an antivirus on a computer with Equation Group spyware on it. Keep in mind that Kaspersky had been fighting Western intelligence services for years at that point. Israeli intelligence actually breached Kaspersky’s network in 2015, no doubt because Kaspersky is the only AV company that actually exposes US-created malware.