H4cked off: Is Eugene Kaspersky 'in bed' (or the sauna) with the Russian government? Derr, of course he is

In a mafia-style kleptocratic state, you can't build a company the size of Kaspersky without attracting the wrong sort of attention

According to a hit piece on Bloomberg, an article more worthy of a bad Friday afternoon at the Daily Mail than a serious newswire, Eugene Kaspersky, the founder and figurehead of security software company Kaspersky Labs, is in bed with the FSB, the feared Russian security services and successor to the KGB.

Indeed, quite literally, they say he is in the sauna with them – once a week, apparently with his old pals at the agency to which he once belonged.

The implication is that behind the closely cropped beard lurks a shifty, untrustworthy frontman, while the more direct accusation is that Kaspersky Labs turns a blind eye to all the nefarious malware that may or may not be pumped out by the Russian state. Can you trust this shadowy company to analyse your email – your most private communications?

No, is their strongly implied suggestion.

Right and wrong

In one sense, Bloomberg is right: it would be naive to think that Eugene Kaspersky and the company he runs don't have links with the Russian state that go beyond selling a mega-licence for Total Security for Business at a special price.

It's a fairly open secret that Russia is basically a mafia-style kleptocracy, complemented by a rapacious public sector that makes up its meagre wages in various types of semi-official extortion. That runs from ordinary policeman ordered out with speed-camera guns with orders to shake down motorists, all the way up to senior managers in the tax office, who set targets for bribes from businesses large and small.

As such, you don't build a company of Kaspersky's size without making sure that you stay on the right side of the right people.

Bill Browder, the founder of Hermitage Capital Management, which he set up in Moscow in 1996, found out how it works when corrupt tax officials filed a phony $230m (£155m) tax refund in his company's name, which they sought to pocket at Russian taxpayers' expense. Later, perhaps, that fraudulent tax return could be used as a pretext to arrest Browder, shut down the company and sequester the assets.

Browder, though, publicly exposed the fraud, as he had done with many others before. Hermitage trading companies in Russia were seized anyway and its lawyer murdered in prison, too. It was just as well for Browder that he had already been blacklisted as a threat to national security and was therefore operating in London at the time instead.

Indeed, Russia's billionaires didn't get to be as rich as Bill Gates on the strength of their immense entrepreneurial acumen alone, or even on the back of a few Derek Trotter-style dodgy deals. Smelting plants and other heavy industrial assets in Siberia weren't acquired and maintained on goodwill alone in the 1990s, but with muscle connected to the kind of people who weren't afraid to break a few bones as part of a day's work.

The fate of the oil empire of ex-oligarch Mikhail Khodorkovsky proved how important it is to stay on the right side of president Putin and the Russian state. When Khodorkovsky started to pose a direct political threat to the Russian establishment, his companies were seized and the assets distributed to loyal vassals, while he ended up in jail with the threat of new charges to follow up the old ones if he didn't keep his gob shut.

So, all the while Russia's billionaire oligarchs uphold the authority of the centralised Russian state, the state will look after them. Indeed, it helped many of them to keep hold of their fortunes in the aftermath of the global financial crisis of 2008-09, for example, when some might otherwise have been wiped out.

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H4cked off: Is Eugene Kaspersky 'in bed' (or the sauna) with the Russian government? Derr, of course he is

In a mafia-style kleptocratic state, you can't build a company the size of Kaspersky without attracting the wrong sort of attention

Mirror image

Security software, though, is different from finance, or metals and mining. It is central to both a modern security state's offensive and defensive capabilities, making companies such as Kaspersky worth protecting and nurturing. Eugene Kaspersky, meanwhile, has wisely sought the kind of international high profile that also helps to insulate a company from encroachments (although stopping short of acquiring an English football team).

But is that so very different from the US, UK – or even corporatist France, where yoghurt companies are deliberately reclassified as "strategic industries" to justify blocking foreign takeovers?

In any case, Eugene Kaspersky's supposed ex-KGB status is also largely specious. Back in the 1980s, a mathematician of his calibre didn't have much choice except to attend an academy run by the KGB if he wanted to continue his studies, and didn't want to be assigned a job on a collective cotton farm in the Uzbek SSR instead.

Besides, the US corporate world, including IT, is likewise stuffed with ex-military of various ranks, while the links between US IT companies and the security services was brutally exposed by the leaks from US National Security Agency (NSA) whistleblower Edward Snowden. RSA Security, for example, took a well-documented $10m bung to incorporate some iffy components into its Bsafe security suite.

US and UK security services also successfully attacked Google, Yahoo, Belgacom and the suppliers of SIM cards to mobile phone operators around the world, among other now well-known and often ingenious attacks – it's therefore not too hard to imagine them nobbling IT suppliers of all kinds in pursuit of their own security agenda.

Indeed, US security software companies large and small routinely receive more legitimate funds from US government agencies for "research", while the CIA has its own venture capital fund explicitly for the purpose of helping to fund the development of technologies that might be of value to the security services in the future. As an aside, they're currently very interested in big data...

So should you trust Kaspersky to keep you safe, even from Russian state intrusions? Of course not, just as no one should place their trust solely in any other single security software or services company, whether British, Russian, French, American or Brazilian.

However, in addition to providing anti-virus software that has a deserved reputation for quality, Kaspersky also plays a valuable role in keeping an eye out for, and publicising, potential threats that we can't be confident that European or American security companies won't well turn a blind eye to – or be asked, or paid, to ignore. It is, in other words, a crucial part of the competitive, global security ecosystem.

That is to everyone's benefit in a world in which Edward Snowden helped show exactly how cynical and amoral security services across the world are – and how they seem to have more in common with each other than with the people they are supposed to be working to protect.