Although Microsoft didn’t investigate the provenance of the false positive, Batchelder’s team noticed that the software was picking up on code that was identical to lines in an actual malware file it had spotted days earlier. In a statement to Reuters, Kaspersky flatly rejected the claims, and the company did not immediately respond to Quartz’ request for comment. But Microsoft’s antimalware research director, Dennis Batchelder, told Reuters that he remembered instances of customers calling in to complain that necessary pieces of software-like the code to make a printer run-had been deemed a threat and put in quarantine. This allows companies to make sure they are covered for the latest attacks, but it also allows them to lean heavily on others’ work, instead of finding new threats themselves.Īccording to Reuters, Kaspersky has for years complained about this borrowing, and co-founder Eugene Kaspersky eventually got fed up with the borrowing, ordering staff to inject malicious code into benign files to fool rival software-including Microsoft’s and Avast’s-into believing that benign files needed to be quarantined, or in some cases, deleted. Many of the antivirus companies share information through Google’s VirusTotal, a free malware and virus detection hub.
