Uncle Sam sanctions Kaspersky's top bosses – but not Mr K himself Uncle Sam took another swing at Kaspersky Lab today and sanctioned a dozen C-suite and senior-level executives at the antivirus maker, but spared CEO and co-founder Eugene Kaspersky. The move prevents US persons and organizations from doing business with the designated individuals. Any non-US financial institution that works …
"Why are so many US cyber security companies headed by former Mossad officials, such as Black Cube, NSO Group and XM Cyber ?"
None of them are 'US cyber security companies'. As you know perfectly well, they are all Israeli. Black Cube and NSO Group don't even have a presence in the US. Stop making stuff up.
.. I get the feeling we're not being told the whole story.
First they sanction the company, long after pt2 of the Ukraine invasion occured. And normally they tell people why they have hit the individuals.
Even for the US it seems odd to sanction them because "they MAY do something"
It's a generic sanction, so it doesn't have to have any 'whole story' at all.
The US government decided that the "technology sector" would be blocked, and Kaspersky operates in the "technology sector", so it's blocked.
The regulation requires the government to actually name people that are sanctioned, but that's to make the sanctions work on the American side.
>"they MAY do something"
I think its likely a question of priorities. There's some junior-ish official in the relevant government department who's got a bee in their bonnet about Kaspersky, maybe for no other reason that it sounds foreign/Russian. But they have to compete for attention with a whole bunch of others who want to sanction this, that and the other so it drops down the job queue. Now things are relatively quiet (because, frankly, we've run out of other stuff to sanction) so its bubbled to the surface. It may be unimportant or irrelevant but the machine will grind into life with appropriate pronunciations, press releases, convincing sounding regulations and so on. "All sound and fury, signifying nothing......"
I have a really uncomfortable feeling that we (the US) as a country have lost the plot. We don't have coherent policy on anything, much less constructive policies. Its just a bunch of civil servants churning out paper for another bunch of civil servants to enforce. The rest of us just go about trying to deal with real problems, everyday stuff like paying bills, trying to make ends meet and the like. (.....and anyone who's got their head screwed on about security would have long since moved on from Windows, especially if they're a 'nation state'!)
"There's some junior-ish official in the relevant government department who's got a bee in their bonnet about Kaspersky, maybe for no other reason that it sounds foreign/Russian."
Ctrl-F for Kaspersky in this document:
https://www.cdse.edu/Portals/124/Documents/casestudies/case-study-nghia-pho.pdf
Not long after that guy was caught, US government departments were ordered to uninstall Kaspersky software.
Kaspersky tried to sue in court, alleging that the ban was “arbitrary and capricious". But of course they knew what had happened, and exactly why they were being banned
"that the Russia-based antivirus developer could be forced or ordered by Putin to backdoor its products and hand over American individuals and organizations' sensitive information from their PCs to Kremlin intelligence."
Twitter, Microsoft, Facebook and a hundred other companies have turned over private info on US citizens to the US Gov.
Pot, meet kettle. Hypocrisy, meet reality.
A universal privacy law is needed. One that forces corporations to opt everyone out of their surveillance services and not force people in through one sided EULA.
> He requested an expedited visa to enter the USA, which was denied.
However:
After that cancelled session, he was not invited again:
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