One part of the whole Richard Silverstein thinks he gets hacked story that didn’t quite make sense was how he managed to have Kaspersky take time out from tracking down Stuxnet to look at his stupid little tale of incompetence.
Well Wired has a list of the 15 most Dangerous People in the World and look who’s on the list (no, don’t worry, Dickie is not important enough to make any lists).
8: Eugene Kaspersky
Not long ago, the U.S. had a widespread online campaign to spy on and destroy the work of Iran’s atomic scientists. Then along came a group of cybersecurity researchers who systematically identified each of Washington’s malware projects — and in so doing, rendered the Stuxnet, Flame, and Duqu espionage programs useless.
A great many of those researchers now work for Eugene Kaspersky, the Russian cybersecurity mogul who runs one of the planet’s largest and most sophisticated malware-fighting firms. And if all he did in the last year was intercede in America’s efforts to short-circuit Iran’s nuclear ambitions — definitively unmasking a cyber weapon for the first time — Kaspersky would’ve earned himself a spot on our list of the most dangerous people in the world.
But there’s more to Kaspersky. A longtime ally of Russia’s secret security services, Kaspersky supplies technical expertise to the FSB, the successor to the KGB. His researchers train their agents in computer forensics. And when Kaspersky’s son was kidnapped, FSB agents came to his rescue. Not long after that, Kaspersky complained publicly that there was “too much freedom” online and pushed for additional government controls over social networks, which he blamed in part for his son’s abduction. A few months later, Moscow passed a new bill banning wide categories of websites and introducing new surveillance techniques to Russian telecom firms.
All of which now has Western intelligence services scratching their heads. Did Kaspersky’s researchers operate on their own when they outed all that anti-Iran malware? Or did they pull it off with some Kremlin help?
So Kaspersky is helping Richard Silverstein because their an anti-western stooge of Russian interests. I’d buy that theory.
h/t to someone.
