Kaspersky antivirus still being used in US despite ban

Some consumers in the United States are still using Kaspersky antivirus, despite the country’s government banning its use. This is according to TechCrunch, who spoke to several users and discovered how they worked around the ban.

Earlier this year, the Biden administration banned the sale of the Russian-made cybersecurity solution, citing privacy concerns. The government claims that it has reasons to believe the Russian state is using the product to siphon out sensitive information from US citizens and spy on them. It hasn’t exactly backed up these claims, but it still forced the company out of the country.

As a result, Kaspersky shut down all of its US operations in mid-July this year, and pushed an update through which it replaced itself with a different antivirus, called UltraAV, on almost all devices in the country. We’re saying “almost all” since, as TechCrunch has found, some people found a way to still keep using the product.

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As reported by the publication, the users found different methods which all revolve around “tricking” the software into thinking the device is not located in the United States. While some just added a non-US server to the list of update servers, others used a VPN tool to do the same.

Asking why they decided to keep Kaspersky around, some said they weren’t worried about data theft and stressed that the US government shouldn’t be “blindly” trusted on this issue. Others were more practical, stating that they purchased a license before the ban and wouldn’t want their money to go to waste.

Ever since the Trump administration, the US government has been quite vocal in its warnings that its adversaries’ tech solutions could pose a security risk. Huawei and ZTE are just some of the companies that suffered as a result, with the former losing many 5G development projects, and even being forced to abandon Android for its mobile devices.

Via TechCrunch