KASPERSKY Zao Lab Inc. issued alerts on use of Wireless-Fidelity (Wi-Fi) in luxury hotels and on a Reuters story that bared allegations of rigging to gain traction in the antivirus software market.
The Russian antivirus software developer warned travelers Wi-Fi in hotels in Bangladesh, Germany, India, Japan, Mozambique, North Korea, Russia, South Korea and Thailand are vulnerable to hacking.
The company named the hackers as members of “Darkhotel” cyberespionage group who infiltrate Wi-Fi networks in luxury hotels to compromise selected corporate executives. The company said the hackers use stolen certificates, try to spearphish and spoof social-engineering techniques.
Kaspersky issued the alert before citing an exclusive Reuters story that said the Russian antvirus firm faked malicious software to harm rivals in the industry. The story www.reuters.com/article/2015/08/14/us-kaspersky-rivals-idUSKCN0QJ1CR20150814) cited unnamed former employees as saying Kaspersky allegedly tricked antivirus software programs by smaller firms into classifying benign files as malicious.
In a statement issued on August 14, the company denied it “conducted any secret campaign to trick competitors into generating false positives to damage their market standing.”
“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.”
However, Kaspersky admitted conducting “a one-time experiment uploading only 20 samples of nonmalicious files to the VirusTotal multiscanner, which would not cause false positives as these files were absolutely clean, useless and harmless.”
“After the experiment, we made it public and provided all the samples used to the media so they could test it for themselves.”