Kaspersky Lab, founded in Moscow in 1997, has been a world leader in cybersecurity for decades. The private company takes pride in working outside of any government’s sphere of influence when it comes to cyber espionage. Americans believe that US intelligence agencies consider the Russian firm a competitive challenge, the experts pointed out.

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“Kaspersky is highly reputable. It has been operating for a couple of decades. It has 400 million users around the world, including until very recently the American government,” former MI5 analyst Annie Machon told RT. “So of course if they are doing it, other countries are going to do it to a competitor corporation around the world too. Obviously, the CIA would be interested in a very successful Russian based company that offers protection on the internet.”

“Kaspersky [has] one of the most successful security teams worldwide. Don’t forget that Kaspersky was the security firm that first of all discovered the NSA linked group of activities involved in cyber espionage activities worldwide,” Pierluigi Paganini, the head of cybersecurity at Grant Thornton Consultants, told RT.

The Russian company became one of the targets amidst the ongoing anti-Russian hysteria in the US, which centers around the unproven allegations of Russian meddling in the 2016 US presidential elections. In September, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) ordered all government agencies to stop using Kaspersky products and remove them from computers, citing “security risks.”

And while Kaspersky Lab is actively cooperating with the US authorities, on Thursday, WikiLeaks published a source code for the CIA hacking tool ‘Hive,’ which was used by US intelligence agencies to imitate the Kaspersky Lab code and leave behind false digital fingerprints. Exposing the CIA’s impersonation of Kaspersky Lab is just a part of WikiLeaks’ Vault 7 and 8 revelations which shed light on the CIA’s electronic surveillance methods and cyber warfare tools.

“What is important in this specific story is the complexity, the effort spent by the US intelligence to make hard the attribution. Kaspersky is the actual victim of these activities. There is a government agency, the CIA that conducted cyber espionage activities to also use false flag in its operation in order to make harder the attribution,” Paganini explained.

Kaspersky Lab remains one of the few companies in the world that can expose the CIA’s scheming, and that is why the Russian company is facing so much backlash, Machon believes.

“We have Kaspersky saying 'We can do this-we can prove some of these hacks are not Russian, they are American’ when it comes to the presidential elections. And so they needed to discredit them, and I think that this new application of a virus at state level, a very aggressive virus that would discredit a very proven brand around the world it’s exactly what the Americans would want and the Israelis also would want,” the former MI5 operative pointed out.

The campaign against the Russian cybersecurity firm goes back to 2010; when Kaspersky Lab revealed the origin of the Stuxnet virus which the company said likely came from American and Israeli intelligence services, Machon told RT. The alleged American/Israeli cyber espionage operation was designed to target industrial control systems used in infrastructure facilities to affect their automated processes. Stuxnet reportedly ruined almost one-fifth of Iran’s nuclear centrifuges Tehran had been using to develop civilian atomic power.

“Stuxnet was deployed against the centrifuges that enriched the uranium and nobody knew where it came from. It seemed to be very weaponized at the state level. And it was actually Kaspersky that unveiled who had developed it. And it was American and the Israeli intelligence agencies,” Machon told RT. “So ever since then, it has sort of been daggers drawn between these two competing sides [Kaspersky vs CIA]. Kaspersky has been very much in crosshairs of both American and Israeli intelligence agencies.”