Anti-Virus Companies Were Targeted GCHQ And NSA

Several anti-virus companies in the past have been the target of US and British intelligence, focusing in particular went to the Russian virus fighter Kaspersky Lab, according to documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2008.

The US NSA and the British GCHQ looked for ways to circumvent virus and other security software. The e-mail traffic was monitored in order to bring users of anti-virus software identified. The documents also show that British intelligence software Kaspersky wanted to reverse engineer and that the NSA was looking for vulnerabilities. US intelligence also shows traffic between the servers and Kaspersky users have viewed the software.

In 2008 discovered a research team from the NSA that the Kaspersky software users sensitive information sent back to the company's servers. This information could easily be captured to track users, says a report. The NSA would have intercepted e-mails, which were intended for security companies and which were warned of new viruses and vulnerabilities, reports the intercept today using different Snowden documents.

According to researcher Joxean Koret anti-virus software is an attractive target for attackers. The software often takes the highest rates in the system. An attack on a virus an attacker could cause these rights. Moreover, the security of many anti-virus software to be desired and even years on other client applications such as browsers and document readers behind, Koret said. "It means that Acrobat Reader, Microsoft Word or Google Chrome are much more difficult to attack than 90% of the virus." It was recently announced that Kaspersky Lab was the victim of a sophisticated attack carried out by a state, according to the virus fighter.