What the heck, Kaspersky???

here Kaspersky claims:

An advisory has recently been published on rootkit.com regarding a vulnerability in KAV 7.0. Unfortunately, the authors of this material chose not to adhere to industry standard practice, and contact the vendor prior to disclosing vulnerability details. Although the authors claim that all attempts to inform Kaspersky Lab about this vulnerability were ignored, this is not the case: if we had been informed, this issue would have been addressed long ago.

I am really upset by this! I reported this vulnerability back in October 2005 in the Kaspersky subforum at malware-research.co.uk, a closed forum for security professionals, and one person from Kaspersky Labs Netherlands replied and said it would be taken care of. Back then (before the reply) I wrote that if they would not respond in due time I’d publish it (without details) through public channels which was taken as a threat by the person who responded. Interestingly I did never check again and it was almost one year later (September 2006) that I joined FRISK Software International and thus the AV industry.

Also fascinating, I am not the one who published it on rootkit.com, instead I chose to contact them in a closed security-aware community and the result was apparently the same, Kaspersky chose to ignore it in the end in both cases. I can well imagine that “the authors claim that all attempts to inform Kaspersky Lab about this vulnerability were ignored”.

Excuse me, but the claims in the above quote are ridiculous to say the least.

// Oliver

BTW: I met said person at the AV Workshop this year. A few weeks after the workshop a bug that I reported more than 18 months ago surfaces again (in one of their latest products!). Amazing!

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