A new report has rumors that Kaspersky attempted to sabotage competitors' antivirus (AV) software for nearly 10 years by allegedly inducing false positive malware detection.

It was alleged that Kaspersky engineers reverse engineered competitors AV software so that they could devise a way to trick it into marking good files as malicious.

Kaspersky denied these claims in an emailed statement to SCMagazine.com.

“Contrary to allegations made in a Reuters news story, Kaspersky Lab has never conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing,” the statement said. “Such actions are unethical, dishonest and illegal. Accusations by anonymous, disgruntled ex-employees that Kaspersky Lab, or its CEO, was involved in these incidents are meritless and simply false.”

The former staffers are claiming that the targets included Microsoft, AVG Technologies, and Avast Software.

Reuters claims that the company amplified its sabotage efforts. While Kaspersky denies this, it did acknowledge in its statement that it conducted an “experiment” that year that involved uploading 20 samples of “non-malicious files” to the VirusTotal multi-scanners, which, Kaspersky wrote, “would not cause false positives as these files were absolutely clean, useless and harmless.”

Kaspersky acknowledged that it had been the victim of a hack when it found hackers' malware on its own systems earlier this year.

Source: SCMagazine