Russian cybersecurity giant Kaspersky Lab is suing the Trump administration over its decision to ban the use of the company’s products by federal agencies. Washington thus deprived Kaspersky Lab of due process, the company argued.
In September the US government’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) banned federal agencies from using Kaspersky Lab antivirus products, citing national security concerns grounded in the fact that the company is Moscow-based. The company’s founder and chief executive Eugene Kaspersky denounced the move as “baseless paranoia at best.”
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“DHS [Department of Homeland Security] has harmed Kaspersky Lab’s reputation and its commercial operations without any evidence of wrongdoing by the company,” Kaspersky said in an open letter to the Homeland Security agency, published on Monday.
The lawsuit claims the government largely relied on uncorroborated media reports as evidence in a review of Kaspersky software. The company asks the court to overturn the ban and officially acknowledge that the Russian company’s products do not pose any security threat to US government computers, Reuters reported.
The value of Kaspersky’s software sales to the US government totaled less than $ 54,000 (about 0.03% of its total US sales), the complaint said.
The whole situation around the US ban on the use of Kaspersky Lab antivirus products by federal agencies “looks very strange,” CEO Kaspersky told Germany’s Die Zeit daily last month. Kaspersky noted that the US authorities ordered all governmental agencies to remove all the company’s software from their computers despite the fact that “we had almost zero installations there.” With little real need for such measures, they were apparently seeking to damage the company’s reputation. “It seems that we just do our job better than others,” Kaspersky said of the motives behind the US government’s move. “We detected some unknown or probably very well-known malware, and that made someone in the US very disappointed.”
