Kaspersky has shut its Washington office after the US government ordered all departments to remove the vendor’s software from its systems.
In September the US Department of Homeland Security gave government organisations 90 days to remove all traces of Kaspersky, citing “ties between certain Kaspersky officials and Russian intelligence”.
Kaspersky vice president Anton Shingarev is said to have confirmed the news in an interview in Moscow.
Shingarev slammed the US’s stance on cybersecurity compared with European governments.
“What I like about Europe is that their regulators are fact-driven”, he said, before accusing the US of making decisions based on “speculations”.
We guess he was not talking about the UK where the UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) advised that a government organisation should not use a Russian-based cybersecurity company if it is processing “secret” information. It stopped short of advising all organisations to ditch Kaspersky completely.
In fact the NCSC said that it did not want people doing things like ripping out Kaspersky software at large, as it makes little sense.
The NCSC also said that it was working with Kaspersky to discuss whether a framework could be developed that will provide assurances of Kaspersky’s integrity to UK organisations.
In fact, the NCSC was talking about central government, which has a “relatively small” number of systems running Kaspersky.
Eugene Kaspersky slammed the media coverage following the NCSC’s advice, writing on Twitter that Kasperksy’s presence in the UK was not at risk.
On Twitter, he said: “Let me stress: there is no ban for KL (Kaspersky Lab) products in the UK.”
