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Russian cyber security firm Kaspersky has more than good enough reason to be feeling a bit sorry for itself. Despite offering the US government its code source in a loyalty bid, the White House has removed the Moscow-based security provider from two lists of approved vendors.
While the Trump administration has concerns over Kaspersky’s links to the Russian government, founder Eugene Kaspersky has repeatedly said his company has nothing to hide. And the company is understandably upset by the decision of the US government to blacklist it from two approved vendor lists. In fact, RIA news reported that Kaspersky believes that it is being dragged into a ‘geopolitical fight’ that it never wanted to be apart of. "By all appearances, Kaspersky Lab happened to be dragged into a geopolitical fight where each side is trying to use the company as a pawn in its game,” a spokesperson for Kaspersky said.
Eugene Kaspersky has more than once proposed meeting U.S. government officials and has offered to testify to the U.S. Congress ‘to respond to all questions from the U.S. government that may arise’.
Understandably worried that it might lose US government contracts over allegations that it is working with the Russian government, founder Eugene Kaspersky has said that he is willing to turn over source code to prove that his security company is not a cover for Russian spies. He said he will do ‘anything’ to prove his company’s intensions, including testifying in front of Congress. “Anything I can do to prove that we don’t behave maliciously I will do it,” Kaspersky added.
The company’s willingness to share its source code comes after the Senate proposed that the national defense department would be ‘prohibited from using software developed by Kaspersky Lab’. It added: “The Secretary of Defense shall ensure that any network connection between… the Department of Defense and a department or agency of the United States Government that is using or hosting on its networks a software platform [associated with Kaspersky Lab] is immediately severed.”
