RweSure

The FBI just interviewed several employees of Kaspersky Antivirus this week.

pbvrocks

Hmmm..is Kaspersky tied to Norton? Anti-virus puts a footprint on every computer it resides on...

Are_we_sure

No. Kaspersky is rumored to be close to Russian Intelligence. Kaspersky himself was educated at KGB insitute for Cryptography and then worked for Russian Military Intelligence.

There's a whole section of his wikipedia page on this. His wiki page also says this

He met his first wife Natalya Kaspersky at Severskoye, a KGB vacation resort, in 1987

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugene_Kaspersky#Controversies

The Company Securing Your Internet Has Close Ties to Russian Spies Kaspersky Lab has published reports on alleged electronic espionage by the U.S., Israel, and the U.K.—but hasn't looked as aggressively at Russia

In 2012, however, Kaspersky Lab abruptly changed course. Since then, high-level managers have left or been fired, their jobs often filled by people with closer ties to Russia’s military or intelligence services. Some of these people actively aid criminal investigations by the FSB, the KGB’s successor, using data from some of the 400 million customers who rely on Kaspersky Lab’s software, say six current and former employees who declined to discuss the matter publicly because they feared reprisals. This closeness starts at the top: Unless Kaspersky is traveling, he rarely misses a weekly banya (sauna) night with a group of about 5 to 10 that usually includes Russian intelligence officials. Kaspersky says in an interview that the group saunas are purely social: “When I go to banya, they’re friends.” Kaspersky says government officials can’t associate his company’s data with individual customers and that he hasn’t had to worry about increased pressure to demonstrate loyalty to Vladimir Putin. “I’m not the right person to talk about Russian realities, because I live in cyberspace,” he says. Nonetheless, while Kaspersky Lab has published a series of reports that examined alleged electronic espionage by the U.S., Israel, and the U.K., the company hasn’t pursued alleged Russian operations with the same vigor. In February, Kaspersky Lab researchers released a remarkably detailed report about the tactics of a hacker collective known as the Equation Group, which has targeted Russia, Iran, and Pakistan, and which cybersecurity analysts believe to be a cover for the U.S. National Security Agency. Kaspersky Lab hasn’t issued a similar report about Russia’s links to sophisticated spyware known as Sofacy, which has attacked NATO and foreign ministries in Eastern Europe. Sofacy was reported on last fall by U.S. cybersecurity company FireEye.

Kaspersky Lab’s ties dramatically increased after two waves of executive departures, say four of the former insiders. The first came in 2012, after Kaspersky scotched an IPO partnership with Greenwich (Conn.) investment firm General Atlantic. Afterward, Chief Business Officer Garry Kondakov circulated an internal e-mail saying that from then on, the company’s highest positions would be held only by Russians, say two people who saw the e-mail. Board meetings, once conducted in English, were now in Russian. The company denies that the e-mail was ever sent.