Cybersecurity

Who's Afraid of Kaspersky?

Kaspersky Lab has been mired in an ongoing crisis. First, on the heels of the congressional inquiry into Russian meddling in the 2016 American presidential elections, the US government proposed and eventually passed a federal ban and purge on the use of Kaspersky Lab software across all government agencies. The British and Dutch governments has since followed suit.

The government bans have also spilled over to the private sector. Best Buy stopped sales of the software, some of Kaspersky Lab’s financial customers dropped it, and more recently, Twitter banned the company from advertising on its platform.

Meanwhile, several news stories alleged that the company’s software helped Russian intelligence services steal highly classified documents from a US National Security Agency contractor. The company’s most recent move to show it’s independent from the Russian government has been to announce a new data center in Switzerland that will store information from customers in US, Europe, Japan, Korea, Singapore and Australia.