The Russian cyber security -software company Kaspersky’s days to operate in the United States are now officially numbered.
The Biden administration said on Thursday that the company prohibits its products to sell to new American customers from 20 July, whereby the company was only allowed to provide software updates to existing customers until 29 September. The prohibition of the first such action among authorities given to the Commerce Department in 2019 in 2019 in 2019 in 2019 follows years of warnings from the US Intelligence Community about Kaspersky are a national security threat of the national security threat.
“If you think of national security, you may think of weapons and tanks and rockets,” said Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo reporters during a briefing Thursday. “But the truth is that it is increasingly about technology, and it is about technology for double use, and it is about data.”
The US carried out a “extremely thorough” research into Kaspersky and explored “any option” to reduce the risks, said Raimondo, but officials have arranged a complete ban “given the continuous offensive cyber capacities of the Russian government and capacity to influence the activities of Kasersky.”
The Kaspersky ban represents the newest gap in the relations between the US and Russia, since the last country remains locked up in a brutal war with Ukraine and takes other steps to threaten Western democracies, including testing a nuclair-driven anti-satellite weapons. But the prohibition can also immediately make business activities more difficult for American companies that use Kaspersky software that will lose antivirus definitions up-to-date that are crucial for blocking malware in just three months.
The BIDEN administration knows about how many customers Kaspersky has in the US, but government lawyers have established that this information is their own company data and cannot be published, according to an official of the Commerce Department, who has informed reporters about the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive issue. The officer said that the “considerable number of American customers includes constitutional and local authorities and organizations that deliver critical infrastructure, such as telecommunications, power and health care.
On Thursday, Raimondo had a message for the American customers of Kaspersky: “You didn’t do anything wrong and you are not subject to criminal or civil fines. However, I would encourage you to immediately stop using that software and switch to an alternative to protect yourself and your data and your family.”
Commerce will collaborate with the departments of Homeland Security and Justice to “get this message” and “ensure a smooth transition”, including via a website that explains the ban, Raimondo said. “We certainly don’t want to disrupt the company or families of Americans.”
DHS’s CyberSecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency will contact critical infrastructure organizations that Kaspersky uses to inform them about the alleged national security risks and “help them to identify alternatives,” said the Commerce Department Officer.
Kaspersky has consistently denied being a national security risk or an agent of the Kremlin. In a statement to Wired, the company accused the government “to have made its decision on the basis of the current geopolitical climate and theoretical care, rather than an extensive evaluation of the integrity of the products and services of Kaspersky.”
