UK and US intelligence services have been relentlessly pursuing Kaspersky Labs and other antivirus software companies to gain detailed information on users.
First reported by The Intercept, the US National Security Agency (NSA) and UK GCHQ used reverse engineering to gain access to antivirus software and monitored web and email traffic to gain intelligence about users and the antivirus companies themselves.
"Personal security products such as the Russian anti-virus software Kaspersky continue to pose a challenge to GCHQ's CNE [Computer Network Exploitation] capability and SRE is essential in order to be able to exploit such software and to prevent detection of our activities," the warrant renewal request said.
It managed to pick up this information from "User-Agent" strings in HTTP header requests and then used these to uniquely identify the devices owned by Kaspersky antivirus users. Kaspersky later denied this was possible in an email sent to The Intercept yet various Twitter users have been able to achieve the same result.
Email eavesdropping
The NSA goes further than that still. It's further claimed that in a presentation given in 2010 on Project CAMBERDADA the agency admitted to monitoring the email accounts of different companies to find flaws in antivirus software.
Neither agency responded to the story when asked for a comment and the latest news comes in the same month that Kaspersky claimed it had been targeted by an intrusion that got to the very centre of its systems.