Maurizio Stefanini March 20, 2022
The Privacy Guarantor has launched an investigation into the use of Kaspersky Antivirus in our public administration. Three years before the war in Ukraine, the US Senate had decided to entrust the western networks to software created by a computer scientist who had graduated from the mathematics department of the KGB High School in Soviet times (1987). behavior at risk. We have now arrived in Italy, following a controversy in which a denunciation by Renato Farina about Libero was also a fundamental element.
PROTECTION
The Guarantor for the Protection of Personal Data has therefore launched an investigation to assess the potential risks related to the processing of personal data of Italian customers by the Russian company that supplies the antivirus software Kaspersky (although the name is not explicitly mentioned). . The initiative was taken by the authority ex officio, but became necessary after Putin’s attack on Ukraine to investigate the alarms raised by numerous Italian and European computer security bodies about the possible use of this product for cyberattacks against Italian users . The Guarantor has therefore asked Kaspersky Lab to indicate the number and type of its Italian customers, as well as detailed information on the processing of personal data related to the various security products or services. Including telemetry or diagnostics. The company must also clarify whether the data will be transferred outside the European Union or in any case made accessible to third countries in the course of processing. Finally, from January 1, 2021, Kaspersky Lab must indicate the number of requests for collection or transfer of personal data relating to Italian data subjects, addressed to the company by government authorities of third countries, distinguishing them by country and indicating how many from them Kaspersky Lab has given positive feedback. A jargon that definitely signals the start of action, albeit more cautiously than in the rest of Europe. While Italy is still investigating, Germany has already decided to remove it and the French government center for IT security has also issued a statement highlighting how “in the current context, the use of some digital tools, in particular B. the tools of the Kaspersky company, may be questioned because of their ties to Russia.” In any case, the Italian government is in the process of issuing an ad hoc decree allowing public administrations to uninstall the software. According to the Contrattipubblici.org database. Kaspersky would be used by 2384 companies in Italy. The company and the founder try to assure that the software is never suitable for malicious attacks on behalf of the Kremlin. For this reason, in November 2020, it completed the move of all its servers to Switzerland and also inaugurated a Center for Transparency in North America. But in 2011, criminals kidnapped Ivan: son of Eugene Kaspersky and his wife Natalya, who was also a programmer and company. Cofounder After a ransom demanded, he was rescued within a few days for an intervention by the Russian services, the background of which could never be clarified. And the Kaspersky family officially still lives in the country.
WHO DECIDES
As the specialist magazine Wired explains, “the thesis of many IT security experts is that antivirus technology itself is too invasive for those installed in the vital ganglia of public administrations or companies to come from a country with which one open minded is hostility. See Kaspersky and Russia adding Italy to the list of hostile countries after Rome joined international sanctions against Ukraine ». “Antiviruses, by their very nature, are software that decides what’s good and what’s bad, what can happen and what needs to be stopped, and they do so based on lists of malware known only to software developers.”
