It said no third parties saw the code, though the media reports had said the spy tool had ended up in Russian government hands. “Following a request from the CEO, the archive was deleted from all our systems,” the company said. The analyst reported the matter to Chief Executive Eugene Kaspersky, who ordered that the company’s copy of the code be destroyed, the company said.

While reviewing the file’s contents, an analyst discovered it contained the source code for a hacking tool later attributed to what Kaspersky calls the Equation Group. computer and found a zip file that was flagged as malicious. It said logs showed that the consumer version of Kaspersky’s popular product had been analyzing questionable software from a U.S. In a statement, the company said it stumbled on the code a year earlier than the recent newspaper reports had it, in 2014. They culminated in the Department of Homeland Security last month barring government agencies from using Kaspersky products. officials who have been campaigning against using Kaspersky software on sensitive computers are likely to seize on the admission that the company took secret code that was not endangering its customer to justify a ban.įears about Kaspersky’s ties to Russian intelligence, and the capacity of its anti-virus software to sniff out and remove files, prompted an escalating series of warnings and actions from U.S.

While the explanation is considered plausible by some security experts, U.S. The admission came in a statement from the embattled company that described preliminary results from an internal inquiry it launched into media reports that the Russian government used Kaspersky anti-virus software to collect National Security Agency technology. SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 25 (Reuters) - Moscow-based Kaspersky Lab on Wednesday acknowledged that its security software had taken source code for a secret American hacking tool from a personal computer in the United States. (Adds company comment on Equation Group discovery other details)

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