Kaspersky smell a rat in McAfee’s espionage report

Eugene Kaspersky, CEO of the Russian online security firm, has spoken out against McAfee’s report alleging large-scale malware attacks on government departments, news organisations and companies, calling it “shoddy”.

At the beginning of this month, McAfee released a report claiming that a huge number of firms and national governments had been the targets of malware attacks for years, and that sensitive information had been stolen by unnamed hackers.

McAfee called the operation Shady RAT and warned that the number of victims could be even larger, since it was very difficult to establish whether a specific firm or organisation had been infected. Competitors Kaspersky, however, poured scorn on the claims, mocking the much-hyped revelation as “Shoddy Rat” and downplaying the attacks’ significance.

Eugene Kaspersky blogged that the report was “alarmist” and didn’t actually reveal any new information, as the attacks had been happening on a fairly harmless scale for years. He said McAfee were “deliberately spreading misrepresented information”. Yesterday morning, he tweeted: “Still McAfee provided no proof any party was compromised and any data was leaked in #ShadyRAT. [Calling it a persistent threat] is a misnomer that misleads the public. Need to coin an alternative.”

McAfee hit back at those claims, with vice president and chief technology officer of the global public sector at the company, saying that Kaspersky was “missing the point”. She insisted that the attacks were real and significant, saying: “This attack was exposed so honest global communities can be aware of the urgency of cross-sector cyber resiliency. The cyber adversaries are agile and fast and disregard the law. They share information with ease and they execute their will upon companies, markets and potentially entire economies.”

A main point of dispute between the two companies seems to be the term used for the attacks, with Kaspersky calling the responsible network a botnet, while McAfee have been referring to Shady RAT as an advanced persistent threat (APT).

On his Twitter page, Kaspersky insisted: “Shady RAT is a threat, but no more than the avalanche of other threats we detect on a daily basis.”

This one might run a little longer, we feel.

Image credit: ojbyrne