It is pointless to debate whether Kaspersky is in bed with the FSB (aka former KGB). I had decided to pretend this particular issue is irrelevant to me, as long as the software performed well.
When I saw this tidbit, however I started reconsidering.
Finally, when I heard that Mr. Kaspersky stated his "simple mission" to be “We are here to save the world.”, and that
"Russia is very rich in software engineers, thanks to Russian technical education system. And actually, Russian software engineers are the best.",
I giggled like my 10 yo daughter does when she watches the cartoon network.
When you are laughing at something you can't really take it seriously any more - clearly the time had come to switch.
Why I giggled you ask - well to quote: "The hubris that we are here to save the world is based on a grossly exaggerated view of ourselves, and it is a very dangerous piece of folly." (attribution to Jonette Christian), and to observe: "Haven't seen any (meaningful) programming languages or operating systems originally done in Russian yet, have you?" (and No, English is NOT my native language either!)
Deciding to do something and actually doing it are two very different things, however. It took yet another irritating discovery to force my hand.
Today I found that my Kaspersky software inserts it's own javascript code in EVERY web page I open. What is more interesting is that it does it even after I removed the Kaspersky extension from Chrome! (Talk about trojans and viruses!)
What this means is not only that the antivirus sees every unencrypted file on my computer (I knew that already), but it also tracks every webpage I go to.
I am OK with Google doing it (they told me they do). I am not OK with Kaspersky doing it "on the sly". Worse, the implementation is buggy - it keeps trying to access a bad URL and swamps the browser.
I checked the support forums and it appears it has been over 6 months since the issue was reported - a bit embarrassing for those best i the world programmers, I'd say.
Or is this a deliberate choice? After all, the Kaspersky software updates itself at least once a day.
My only conclusion is that they either chose to not fix the issue or they cannot fix the issue. I am not sure which one is worse or a bigger cause for concern...
Finally it was "Досвидания Товарищи" (Goodbye Comrades).
In a grand and admittedly meaningless gesture I decided to send even more of my money to Eastern Europe and purchased Romanian made BitDefender for my home office computer.
Murphy's law struck, of course - the BitDefender registration site was down immediately after they collected my money online.
The good news was that they have 24x7x7 worldwide support and while the wait on hold was too long, it was still only a quarter of my personal Microsoft "tech support on hold" average. The person who answered the phone knew exactly what the problem was and - surprize - his accent was no worse than mine and I could understand him just fine!
Best of all - it only took an hour for everything to come back and as I write this, I am happily installing my new software.
In conclusion - I feel compelled to offer some generic advice:
Do not trust any cyber security software absolutely.
You have to find a way to "police the policeman" on your computers.
To that effect, if you have more that one computer, subscribe to more than one security software suite and don't buy the 3-year packages - change them every 12 months. There is associated cost, of course but there are also excellent free packages.
As of today it will be Norton360 at work, Panda on my laptop and BitDefender at home.
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