The use of Kaspersky products, however, remains legal in the United States except on government computers. The BSI alleges that the firm could be implicated in hacking incidents related to Russia’s war against Ukraine.Īround the same time, the United States Federal Communications Commission blacklisted Kaspersky from buying services, parts, and components from U.S. In April 2022, The German Federal Office for Information Security, known as BSI, urged the public to avoid using Kaspersky due to its ties to the Russian government.

Kaspersky Antivirus System Watcher Settings More Allegations About Kaspersky’s Russian Ties If it still makes you nervous, you can adjust your settings to opt out of the code insertion. And more importantly, Kaspersky updated its code so that individual computers can’t be tracked. 5 We don’t think this is a reason to shy away from Kaspersky, though-advertisers work hard to find our data wherever they can. In 2019, journalists pointed out that the way Kaspersky protects users online, by injecting a snippet of code into URLs, could allow other companies to track a computer’s browser traffic for advertising purposes. While that point is hard to prove, we found it reassuring that starting in 2018, Kaspersky started moving its data centers holding non-Russian data from Russia to Switzerland. Kaspersky has denied ties with the Russian government and claimed that the bans are the result of U.S-Russia tensions. 3 And the U.S argues that Kaspersky hacked into an NSA contractor’s laptop through its software back in 2015. 2 Twitter has banned Kaspersky Lab from advertising on the site, and Best Buy even stopped selling the company’s products. 1 In 2017, the U.S Department of Homeland Security banned the use of Kaspersky software by any federal agency, and Britain followed suit shortly after. Rumors about Kaspersky started spreading back in 2012 when Bloomberg pointed out a pattern of new hires with connections to the Russian military establishment.

government, but from other world leaders as well. This brought a lot of heat onto Kaspersky, not just from the U.S.

In recent years, however, we’ve seen disturbing allegations of ties between Kaspersky and the Russian government, of which the U.S. It even helped identify hacking plots run by governments. Kaspersky was founded in Russia in 1997, and it quickly emerged as a global cybersecurity leader. First things first-let’s address the elephant in the room.

Products kaspersky lab