Fear and Loathing in the anti-virus world

Exclusive: Russia's Kaspersky threatened to 'rub out' rival, email shows

SAN FRANCISCO | By Joseph Menn, Reuters

In 2009, Eugene Kaspersky, co-founder of one of the world's top security companies, told some of his lieutenants that they should attack rival antivirus software maker AVG Technologies N.V. (AVG.N) by "rubbing them out in the outhouse," one of several previously undisclosed emails shows.He was quoting from Vladimir Putin's famous threat a decade earlier to pursue Chechen rebels wherever they were: "If we catch them in the toilet, then we will rub them out in the outhouse."

Former employees say that the reprisal Kaspersky was pushing for was to trick AVG's antivirus software into producing false positives - that is, misclassifying clean computer files as infected.
As previously reported by Reuters, the plan involved creating fake virus samples and malware identifications to fool competitors into disabling or deleting important files, thereby creating problems for their customers.

(More here.)